I like badblocks and don't know a better more reliable way of checking the drive. If there are no errors from badblocks and dmesg doesn't produce any SATA related errors, the drive should be good (for now at least). I also prefer to do read and write mode, yes it takes ages but it is really the best way of doing it. This gives me the most confidence in knowing that a drive, especially a new one is at least OK at the moment. To test in read only mode........

This is one in a series of weird things whichIthought was motherboard related (I RMA'd the motherboard), the RAM tests fine with memtest86 and I used badblocks on both RAID 1 members with no errors and smartctl is happy with them. Basically the array crashes the kernel a lot and has issues when writing. [112322.723465] md0: rw=0, want=14958668696, limit=1887460480 [112322.731077] attempt to access beyond end of device [112322.731087] md........

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........