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 [email protected]
From: "Billy Crook" [email protected] To: KCLUG [email protected] 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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