Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Billy Crook]

There's nothing quite as reassuring as uncertainty.

On 6/26/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
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