There's nothing quite as reassuring as uncertainty.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/26/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jonathan Hutchins</b> <<a href="mailto:hutchins@tarcanfel.org">hutchins@tarcanfel.org
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I think the only thing that stress testing a drive would do would be to move
<br>it closer to it's failure point. Either that will be early, in which case it<br>might possibly happen while testing, not quite as early, in which case it<br>will happen just after installation instead of a week after installation, or
<br>it will be later in the drive's life - in which case it will just happen a<br>bit sooner than it would have.<br><br>About the only use I can see for this would bet to stress test a few examples<br>of a certain model of a drive to failure, and see what the MTBF is.
<br><br>There are also environmental factors to consider. Testing the drive in an<br>open, bench-configured computer really doesn't give you any information about<br>how it will perform in a closed case sandwiched between two other hot drives.
<br>This is one reason that some manufacturer's well intentioned MTBF estimates<br>are inaccurate.<br><br>Frankly, throwing it off a high building seems just as informative.<br><br>If you can write a pattern to the drive and it passes fsck, and you can repeat
<br>this two or three times, that is going to be about as good a test as you can<br>usefully perform. A drive that will function that well is an unpredictable<br>distance from failure.<br>_______________________________________________
<br>Kclug mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Kclug@kclug.org">Kclug@kclug.org</a><br><a href="http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug">http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug</a><br></blockquote></div><br>