Hard Disk Monitoring

I've just picked up three Western Digital 3TB RED drives to install in a Synology NAS. I'd like to test these drives before installation so I started reviewing the various tests provided by HD Sentinel and the following FAQ.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests

However, at this point I'm not sure which of these I should run as a first time test. Is there a best practice recommendation to testing new NAS drives?

Yes, generally the section:

http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests

shows the recommended tests:

To summarize, the following steps are the best to detect and repair hard disk problems:
1) Disk -> Short self test
2) Disk -> Extended self test
3) Disk -> Surface test -> Read test
4) Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialize disk surface

Personally I always use these tests as these are combination of hardware self tests (running inside the hard disk) and software based tests (running with data communication between the hard disk and the actual system). These also performs reading / writing, so we can verify if all sectors could be read / written, there are no damaged, bad or slowly / hardly accessible sectors.

Thanks, HDSentinel. Are you saying you run all these 4 tests on new drives or just one of the four? I'm looking for the best practice approach most people should take when verifying a new drive is ok to use.

Also, is there a limit to how many drives can be tested in parallel in a single server with HDS?

For best results, to make sure that we test in different aspects, yes, I always recommend to perform all of these 4 tests.

There is no limit of drives to be tested at the same time. You can start any number of tests at the same time.
If you start Disk menu -> Short self test / Extended self test, you can use the "Background" button to let the test run in the background, select a different hard disk and start the test on it too.
The Disk menu -> Surface test functions are running in new windows, you can also select multiple times to start tests on different hard disks.

And you can also combine them in any ways, for example
- start Disk menu -> Extended self test on 3 hard disks
- start Disk menu -> Surface test -> Read test on 2 other hard disks
- start Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface test on 1 other hard disk
and so.