Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Billy Crook]

Spinrite is a dos program.  The boot media likely uses some sort of free dos
clone.

On 7/5/07, David Spake <dspake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/2/07, Monty J. Harder <mjharder at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On 7/1/07, Jeffrey McCright <jmccright at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > 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.
>
> On that suggested Ultimate Boot CD, the PowerMax tool for Maxtor
> drives (2.09?) will perform a repetitive 'Stress Test' on internal
> drives.  If I remember right, it will perform a complete write/read
> test of every section of the drive for up to (I think) 30 times.
> IIRC, it (unofficially) works with any drive, but you'll have to check
> on it.
>
> >
> > Testing modern hard drives is complicated by the fact that the onboard
> > controller manages defects internally.  When the drive writes a sector
> of
> > data, it reads it back to verify that it can be done correctly.  If it
> > can't, it locates a spare sector and tries to write there instead.  Once
> it
> > finds a good spare sector, it records in its internal data structures
> that
> > it has remapped the sector to the good location.
>
> I saw some reasearch (January, Dec 06, ??) from Google and one of the
> Univ. of California schools on hard drive analysis.  After testing
> several hundred thousand drives from a variety of mfg's, they both
> found that there was basically no way to tell what drive would fail
> when, or in what fashion.  Google found that of the numerous (40?)
> SMART parameters each HD companies tracks, with only 5 was there any
> kind of statistical correspondance to failure.  By using those 5, they
> were able to correctly predict upcoming failure in (get this) 40% of
> their drives, thus leaving the other ~60% to some unknown cause.
>
> > I've heard good things about SpinRite, but it's far from free as in
> beer,...
>
> Spinrite is a fine program, which I'll vouch for (and paid for if for
> nothing else to support the fine product he puts out).  GRC has been
> producing this for many, many years and as far back as I can remember
> it's always been head and shoulders above the competition.  I always
> thought the program booted into soemthing other than DOS, but I could
> be wrong there.
>
> Dave
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