Spinrite is a dos program. The boot media likely uses some sort of free dos clone.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/5/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Spake</b> <<a href="mailto:dspake@gmail.com">dspake@gmail.com
</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;">On 7/2/07, Monty J. Harder <<a href="mailto:mjharder@gmail.com">mjharder@gmail.com
</a>> wrote:<br>>> On 7/1/07, Jeffrey McCright <<a href="mailto:jmccright@hotmail.com">jmccright@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br>> > Can anyone recommend a program or method of stress testing hard<br>>> drives? I check memory/cpu with memtest86, but I would like some way to
<br>>> stress test a hard drive. Currently I dd urandom over it for a few days or<br>>> DBAN it, but I'm looking for something more thought out. Preferably, a<br>>> program that can run on a live system so I'd just attach the drive to be
<br>>> tested, and point the test at /dev/sdd or whatever dev it was on.<br>>> Preserving data on the drive is (obviously) not a concern.<br><br>On that suggested Ultimate Boot CD, the PowerMax tool for Maxtor
<br>drives (2.09?) will perform a repetitive 'Stress Test' on internal<br>drives. If I remember right, it will perform a complete write/read<br>test of every section of the drive for up to (I think) 30 times.<br>
IIRC, it (unofficially) works with any drive, but you'll have to check<br>on it.<br><br>><br>> Testing modern hard drives is complicated by the fact that the onboard<br>> controller manages defects internally. When the drive writes a sector of
<br>> data, it reads it back to verify that it can be done correctly. If it<br>> can't, it locates a spare sector and tries to write there instead. Once it<br>> finds a good spare sector, it records in its internal data structures that
<br>> it has remapped the sector to the good location.<br><br>I saw some reasearch (January, Dec 06, ??) from Google and one of the<br>Univ. of California schools on hard drive analysis. After testing<br>several hundred thousand drives from a variety of mfg's, they both
<br>found that there was basically no way to tell what drive would fail<br>when, or in what fashion. Google found that of the numerous (40?)<br>SMART parameters each HD companies tracks, with only 5 was there any<br>kind of statistical correspondance to failure. By using those 5, they
<br>were able to correctly predict upcoming failure in (get this) 40% of<br>their drives, thus leaving the other ~60% to some unknown cause.<br><br>> I've heard good things about SpinRite, but it's far from free as in beer,...
<br><br>Spinrite is a fine program, which I'll vouch for (and paid for if for<br>nothing else to support the fine product he puts out). GRC has been<br>producing this for many, many years and as far back as I can remember
<br>it's always been head and shoulders above the competition. I always<br>thought the program booted into soemthing other than DOS, but I could<br>be wrong there.<br><br>Dave<br>_______________________________________________
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