DDV DRIVE PREP Recommendation

Check Your Drive Before DEF CON

Planning to bring a hard drive or SSD to the Data Duplication Village? If your drive shows errors during the duplication process, it will be pulled and returned to you without the data you’re hoping to get.

While we strongly recommend bringing NEW 8 TB SATA3 drives to increase the chance of success (side note: our friends at Backblaze have accumulated statistics on thousands of drives in their environment, including new drives with very low failure rates), there are other ways to improve your rate of success.

Some people bring the same drive to the DDV every year. While these might have few hours on them, regardless of the time spent spinning, the older they get, the higher the failure rate becomes.

Take a few minutes before DEF CON to check the health of any drives you intend to bring. While no test can predict every failure, these tools can identify many common warning signs before you travel.  Checking your drive’s health before coming can give you the time to swap out any failing drives, helping avoid disappointment.

SMART Analysis of drives:

Modern hard drives and SSDs maintain internal health statistics known as SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology).  A healthy drive will generally report:

  • No SMART failures

  • No critical warnings

  • No pending sectors

  • No uncorrectable sectors

  • No significant media errors

Consider investigating further or replacing your drives if you see:

  • SMART failure

  • Critical Warning

  • Reallocated Sectors

  • Pending Sectors

  • Offline Uncorrectable Sectors

  • Media Errors

  • Rapidly increasing error counts 

Many drives continue operating despite these warnings, but they may be at increased risk of failure.  If your drive shows warnings or failing health status, we recommend setting that drive aside and bringing a new drive for the DDV to use for duplication.

While this information does not certify a drive as healthy, it can help with early identification of warning signs.


What type of drives does the DDV recommend? 

Other than going with 8TB drives, we don’t. We are frequently asked which drives are the best and, while we have no official opinion, we have some good data at our disposal. Check out our historical data from past cons at https://dcddv.org and the reports that Backblaze publishes:

Below are some instructions for checking SMART data on your drives for various operating systems. We assume you know how to attach a drive to your computer, and you trust the drive you plan to attach to your computer.

Have fun and make good choices!

Getting SMART Data on Windows

Option 1: CrystalDiskInfo (Recommended)

CrystalDiskInfo is a free utility that provides an easy-to-read summary of drive health. https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xp8k4rgx25g3gm

  1. Install and launch CrystalDiskInfo.

  2. Select the drive you plan to bring.

  3. Review the reported Health Status.

Typical results:

  • Good — No obvious warnings detected.

  • Caution — One or more attributes may require attention.

  • Bad — The drive is reporting serious problems.

If the drive reports Caution or Bad, review the SMART details before relying on the drive.

Option 2: PowerShell

Open PowerShell and run: 

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter

Getting SMART Data on macOS

Built-In Method

  1. Open Apple Menu → About This Mac → General

  2. Select System Report.

  3. Select Storage.

  4. Locate your drive.

  5. Review the SMART Status field.

A healthy drive will typically report:

  • SMART Status: Verified

Second option

In Terminal, try one of these commands:

system_profiler SPNVMeDataType
diskutil info disk0

If you see a line like this, no serious errors have been identified.

S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

Advanced More Data Method (smartctl)

Install smartmontools from https://www.smartmontools.org. Some useful commands are

To identify attached drives:

sudo smartctl  --scan

To see detailed SMART data:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk0

(Replace disk0 with the appropriate disk shown in smartctl --scan)

On devices with NVMe disks, you may see something like this:

IOService:/AppleARMPE/arm-io@10F00000/AppleT811xIO/ans@77400000/AppleASCWrapV4/iop-ans-nub/RTBuddy(ANS2)/RTBuddyService/AppleANS3CGv2Controller/NS_01@1 -d nvme

If so, try this command to display SMART data:

	sudo smartctl -i -a disk0

Review the output for SMART failures, media errors, or critical warnings. Example:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       APPLE SSD AP1024Z
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02, NSID 0xffffffff)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        38 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    1%
Data Units Read:                    197,905,310 [101 TB]
Data Units Written:                 85,424,017 [43.7 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 5,489,642,997
Host Write Commands:                1,872,261,831
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       287
Power On Hours:                     1,542
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   7
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0		🡨--- You want no errors
Error Information Log Entries:      0		🡨--- You want no errors

Getting SMART Data on Linux

Install smartmontools using your distribution’s package manager.

Check overall health:

sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdX
sudo smartctl -H /dev/nvme0

A healthy drive will typically report:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

For additional details:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX

or

sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0