So what label would come on out of box failure drives? The best thing I can think of is to partiton the drive and format with ext3, setting the block size low and performing a bad block check. Also do some reasearch into SMART and see if you can use smartds to log possible failures. Depending on the drive manufacturer, some log way before the failure.

-john frakes

-----Original Message----- From: "Billy Crook" billycrook@gmail.com To: "Geoffrion, Ron P [IT]" Ron.Geoffrion@sprint.com Cc: kclug@kclug.org Sent: 6/26/2007 11:51 AM Subject: Re: Stress Testing Hard Drives

I think they should lable hard drives with their halflife.

On 6/26/07, Geoffrion, Ron P [IT] Ron.Geoffrion@sprint.com wrote:

MTBF is a measure of certainty.

Thanks,

Ron Geoffrion 913.488.7664

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*From:* kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] *On Behalf Of *Billy Crook *Sent:* Tuesday, June 26, 2007 11:45 AM *To:* Jonathan Hutchins *Cc:* kclug@kclug.org *Subject:* Re: Stress Testing Hard Drives

There's nothing quite as reassuring as uncertainty.

On 6/26/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org > wrote:

...

I think the only thing that stress testing a drive would do would be to move it closer to it's failure point. Either that will be early, in which case it might possibly happen while testing, not quite as early, in which case it will happen just after installation instead of a week after installation, or it will be later in the drive's life - in which case it will just happen a bit sooner than it would have.

About the only use I can see for this would bet to stress test a few examples of a certain model of a drive to failure, and see what the MTBF is.

There are also environmental factors to consider. Testing the drive in an open, bench-configured computer really doesn't give you any information about how it will perform in a closed case sandwiched between two other hot drives. This is one reason that some manufacturer's well intentioned MTBF estimates are inaccurate.

Frankly, throwing it off a high building seems just as informative.

If you can write a pattern to the drive and it passes fsck, and you can repeat this two or three times, that is going to be about as good a test as you can usefully perform. A drive that will function that well is an unpredictable distance from failure. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug