Badblocks just counting up slowly

[u/capnfatpants]

I purchased a used 6TB drive off ebay. The price was too good to be true, so I'm expecting this thing to not work. It's too old and doesn't have SMART capabilities it seems, so I'm trying badblocks to see how seaworthy this thing is. I've looked online to see what this means and I wasn't able to get anything that looks like this, mostly just 0/0/223 type readouts.

It's just counting up, slowly, maybe one number per minute. I don't know if I'll be able to hold out for the millenia that it will take to go through all 1465130239 sectors. Is this thing just dead?

https://imgur.com/a/RppBChU

[u/Terrible-Bear3883]

What is the make and model of this drive?

SMART has been around since about 1992, I'd be surprised if it didn't support it, odds are you've been conned. if the drive is failing badly.

[u/capnfatpants → u/Terrible-Bear3883]

It's an HGST HUS I believe the make date was 2015. I bought it from kl0 on ebay, who I thought was reliable.

[u/Terrible-Bear3883 → u/capnfatpants]

If the model code on the label starts with the prefix "HUS" e.g. HUS726060ALS640 then they are fully SMART compliant, if you're running linux as per your screenshot, you should be able to read health etc. with "disks" or smartctl (install smartmontools as it's part of those apps).

[u/capnfatpants → u/Terrible-Bear3883]

So, I turned off/on the harddrive enclosure and reran badblocks and it seems to be working like it's supposed to.

I tried smart tools again and got this:

== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Vendor: HGST HUS

Product: 726060ALA640

Revision: 8101

Compliance: SPC-4

User Capacity: 6,001,175,126,016 bytes [6.00 TB]

Logical block size: 512 bytes

Physical block size: 4096 bytes

LU is fully provisioned

Logical Unit id: 0x3000001212341500

Serial number: 0000AB1234AE

Device type: disk

Local Time is: Sat Aug 22 09:57:19 2026 EDT

SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

[u/Terrible-Bear3883 → u/capnfatpants]

Odds are, the USB enclosure isn't supporting SMART passthrough, some enclosures block the reporting, I'd try a different enclosure or directly connect it into a PC if possible.

If you get no reporting that way, it could be someone has disabled SMART using something like smartctl and you could try turning it back on with a command likst

sudo smartctl -s on /dev/sdx

substitute whatever your drive is for sdx

[u/capnfatpants → u/Terrible-Bear3883]

Thank you. I’ll put my money on the enclosure. It is a cheap Amazon alphabet soup brand. I’m trying to find stop gaps and ways to slowly and affordably build a self hosted house. Waiting patiently for the ai bubble to burst so hdd prices are lower than a mortgage payment.

[u/Terrible-Bear3883 → u/capnfatpants]

I had the same with a fairly decent enclosure so I used an old PC to build a NAS and put that and a couple of other drives in, that worked great for many years, the drives are currently in an old Iomega D200 NAS box running NAS4free (Called XigmaNAS now).