datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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I would return it, but if you are curious you can try some of the following to get experiencing identifying bad disks.
You could try a different computer or controller to be sure.
If you can get some writes/reads to work, you can use badblocks or dm-crypt: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Badblocks#Alternatives
Badblocks will write known data to disk then read it to verify its good. If the disk is malicious, this can be faked. badblocks is also a little slow.
Using dm-crypt in the wiki will write zeros through dm-crypt which will result in random noise being written to disk, then compare with zeros to verify reads are good. This can not be faked easily since the zero stream is encrypted as it is written to disk.