Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I think the only thing that stress testing a drive would do would be to move 
it closer to it's failure point.  Either that will be early, in which case it 
might possibly happen while testing, not quite as early, in which case it 
will happen just after installation instead of a week after installation, or 
it will be later in the drive's life - in which case it will just happen a 
bit sooner than it would have.

About the only use I can see for this would bet to stress test a few examples 
of a certain model of a drive to failure, and see what the MTBF is.

There are also environmental factors to consider.  Testing the drive in an 
open, bench-configured computer really doesn't give you any information about 
how it will perform in a closed case sandwiched between two other hot drives.  
This is one reason that some manufacturer's well intentioned MTBF estimates 
are inaccurate.

Frankly, throwing it off a high building seems just as informative.

If you can write a pattern to the drive and it passes fsck, and you can repeat 
this two or three times, that is going to be about as good a test as you can 
usefully perform.  A drive that will function that well is an unpredictable 
distance from failure.