On 6/26/07, Billy Crook <billycrook@gmail.com
> wrote:
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.
While not all about stress testing the drive,I may have a stress reducer for many of us
In several POS arenas we use a hardware mirror controller called "Duplidisk"
The best article explanation of the device is here:
Do take note that Duplidisk is totally OS and application agnostic for it's IDE device role.
Of a 2005 project run involving some 2900 of these there were maybe 3 failures on systems relying on the Dupli, and 1 of those was my being given an incorrect firmware update- which was recoverable from. The other 2? one was in a lab confirming my firmware bug, and the third was "pepsi syndrome-sadly dupli is not pepsi proof.
But as a real world dragonslayer it just plain works!
Oren Beck
"If you think some trick devices are too expensive consider the cost of _not_ having used them"