Burning in a hybrid disk-drive?

[GeoffS]

Hi,

I use disk-drives for image and video backup and I always burn them in for a few days to weed out the early failures before I put them into service.
I use sets of three disks for redundancy (i.e. the same data on three drives).
The first drive also acts as a "working disk" so I generally get a higher performance disk for that slot.

I've just purchased a hybrid disk (Segate ST1000DX001) and I'm wondering if there is any good way to burn it in without adding tons of writes to the SSD?

Cheers,

Geoff S.

[David (PassMark)]

These hybrid disks are a bit of a black box. The operating system can't control, or even see, where the data is being written. So for long sequential writes is it possible that the internal SSD isn't used much at all. It really depends on the algorithms used inside the drive.

However it seems perfectly reasonable to buy a 4TB drive and fill it up with data a couple of times without reducing its life span significantly. i.e. the internal SSD should be designed to deal with a lot of writes if their algorithm creates this situation.

[GeoffS]

David - thanks for the quick reply. That's what I was thinking, too.

I checked the Segate docs for the drive and there doesn't appear to be any command that would disable the SSD cache.

The good news is that since this is first-line drive, it will get much more activity that the other two (which are mostly sitting in offline storage boxes).

Cheers,

Geoff S.