On 7/1/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jeffrey McCright</b> <<a href="mailto:jmccright@hotmail.com">jmccright@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>Ladies and Gentlemen, TAKE A HINT! This is why newbies don't look long to<br>the KCLUG for support, and quite possibly one of the reasons why people<br>don't give Linux a second look. I have several friends whom I have directed
<br>to the KCLUG and after posting one or two questions to the list, have given<br>up on the list. I no longer point non-technical people to the list as they<br>get frustrated and offended. There it is.<br></blockquote></div>
<br>I don't think a person who can write this (<span style="font-weight: bold;">emphasis mine</span>) is a 'newbie'. <br><br><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote"><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
Can anyone recommend a program or method of stress testing hard
drives? I check memory/cpu with <span style="font-weight: bold;">memtest86</span>, but I would like some way
to stress test a hard drive. Currently I <span style="font-weight: bold;">dd urandom</span> over it for a few
days or <span style="font-weight: bold;">DBAN</span> 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 <span style="font-weight: bold;">/dev/sdd</span> or whatever dev
it was on. Preserving data on the drive is (obviously) not a concern.
</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br></div><br>The upshot of all of this is that you have not one clue that there is a bad sector, because the drive lies about it. Any utility to test a HD needs to know how to tell the drive to stop lying, which may vary between manufacturers or even models for all I know. That's operating at a VERY low level, underneath what the device driver would be doing, so it's going to require kernel-mode hackery and either a special kernel like memtest, or a special driver module that can be loaded to provide that level of access to the drive. If that's even possible.
<br><br>I've heard good things about <a href="http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm">SpinRite</a>, but it's far from free as in beer, and is written in DOS to be booted and run from a floppy or CD. Maybe someone will write a free utility that provides all that functionality, even after Linux has loaded drivers to talk to the lying hard drives. And ponies.
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