Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Jeffrey McCright]

OK, I am going to take a leap here, but I believe Billy is looking for a 
simple utility to be run from an existing computer system that can be 
employed to test used and possibly new drives to verify that the drive does 
not have bad spots in the media and can still be used reliably with a 
certain amount of confidence and NOT to run a hard drive to death to verify 
that drives Mean Time Between Failures value.

I am also assuming that Billy isn't directly interested in what 
environmental conditions will reduce or extend a disk drives life span 
including (while cute) dropping a drive off a tall building.

Based on the original e-mail, I further assume that Billy is looking for a 
direct answer such as the name of an utility or a link to an utility that 
performs a stress test on hard drives and not a dissertation on hard drive 
technology, hard drive manufacturing Quality Assurance processes, best 
practice hard drive environmental conditions, nor the self perceived 
importance of KCLUG member's peripherals knowledge base. In short, I believe 
Billy is asking for quick, honest, and accurate help in locating diagnostic 
software for his particular situation.

Ladies and Gentlemen, TAKE A HINT! This is why newbies don't look long to 
the KCLUG for support, and quite possibly one of the reasons why people 
don't give Linux a second look. I have several friends whom I have directed 
to the KCLUG and after posting one or two questions to the list, have given 
up on the list. I no longer point non-technical people to the list as they 
get frustrated and offended. There it is.

Let the Flames begin!


Jeffrey A. McCright, A+
816-210-3107
jmccright at hotmail.com





>From: "Billy Crook" <billycrook at gmail.com>
>To: KCLUG <kclug at kclug.org>
>Subject: Stress Testing Hard Drives
>Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:08:56 -0500
>
>Can anyone recommend a program or method of stress testing hard drives?  I
>check memory/cpu with memtest86, but I would like some way to stress test a
>hard drive.  Currently I dd urandom over it for a few days or DBAN it, but
>I'm looking for something more thought out.  Preferably, a program that can
>run on a live system so I'd just attach the drive to be tested, and point
>the test at /dev/sdd or whatever dev it was on.  Preserving data on the
>drive is (obviously) not a concern.


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