Stress Testing for new HDDs?

[BobS]

As you have probably already discovered, the NAS will pretty much do the testing when you first install the drives. In my case, I installed 4 new 8TB drives and it took 44 hours to perform the "optimization" and another 11 hours of "Data Scrubbing" even though I had no personal files on it. I had asked Rob about these and the "optimization" is the initialization process where it checks every bit location on the drives.So while there are other ways of checking these drives before you install them, I doubt you would gain any advantage over letting the NAS perform the testing. When you get all done with the initial setup you can run the Extended SMART test and then schedule it to run the extended test every month to keep tabs. You didn't state the model or number/size of the hard drives so your mileage will vary...BobS