Our Testing Methodology

One of the biggest things that sets ServerPartDeals apart from the competition is our testing process. It’s a bit ironic though, because we don’t really talk about our testing at all. Which is really a shame, because not only have we invested some of our best minds into this process, but we have also poured a significant amount of time and money into testing that we never talk about… so let’s talk about it.

First, break it down into the actual steps that go into testing, then discuss the issues we’ve run into by trying to scale testing to support hundreds of drives a day.

1. Physical inspection
• The very first step in the testing process is physical inspection. Here the biggest things to look for is major shipping damage, and to make sure the drives are not maracas. If the drives show no major physical damage, then we can move onto the second step in our process.
  
2. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) 
• The second step in our testing, and the only step to most people’s testing, is dumping the SMART data. SMART data is like a ledger for the drive’s history, it will tell you the power on hours, reallocated sector count, total data written, temperate ranges, even obscure things like the amount of helium still in a helium sealed drive or the time it takes for the read/write head to position itself. This is a great resource, but we face a major issue with SMART data: we primarily sell manufacturer-recertified drives, which come to us with absolutely ZERO SMART data. It is all wiped in the recertification process, so that history the drive had is gone. If in the process of being shipped to us, a particular drive got a bad bump, and now has some bad sectors, we would have no idea. Not to mention the actual performance of the drive, or its overall condition.
  
3. Throughput Testing
• Even if a drive’s SMART data isn’t showing us blatant issues, there can easily be issues with the drive we’re simply not seeing because the damaged sectors have never had data read from or written to. So, we move on to throughput testing—writing to and reading from the drive to ensure it performs at expected speeds.
  We run several rounds of read and write tests to make sure not only is the drive free of defects, but that it can actually perform as it should with expected read/write speeds.
4. Sector Scanning
• The last aspect of our process is sector scanning. Even if the SMART data is telling us the drive is fine, and the read/write speeds are as expected, that doesn’t mean every sector on the drive is functioning properly. So every drive that comes through gets intensive sector scanning to ensure it is fully functional, and to keep you from, let’s say, backing up terabytes of data, and then finding out you have bad sectors half-way through a 20TB data transfer. 

Scaling

When it comes to scale, anyone can throw a few drives into their PC or NAS and run some quick tests. When you want to scale this process up however, things become much more difficult. You start to run into issues like throughput restrictions, heat/power management, and even something as simple as connecting the drives to the testing machine needs scale considerations. Not even mentioning data management. If you’re testing four drives yourself, you can have a neat little easy to navigate GUI with your testing information that’s easy to read. But what about when you’re testing thousands of drives a week and need to retrieve data on two drives out of a thousand that failed so you can remove them from inventory?

To manage scale, we use specially designed testing machines to avoid any bandwidth or power restrictions and allow us to quickly start and stop drive testing. From here, every single drive is fully tested and benchmarked. Its results are then compared to our internal standards to see if it passes or fails. Whether or not it passes or fails though, it has its testing data dumped into a text file along with its serial number. So if we need to find data on a specific drive, we can easily search for it and locate the drive, its physical location in the building, and all of its testing data. 

Conclusion

Testing a few hundred drives a month is one thing, but when you’re handling thousands upon thousands of units, maintaining high standards becomes much more complex. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in creating a testing infrastructure that can scale with our business.

This investment allows us to confidently say: Every drive we sell has been thoroughly tested. 

Our rigorous testing process, combined with our dedication to customer satisfaction, ensures that you can purchase with confidence. We guarantee that if you experience any issues, we will work with you to resolve them.

Thank you for trusting ServerPartDeals, where quality meets confidence!