Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Monty J. Harder]

On 7/1/07, Jeffrey McCright <jmccright at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Ladies and Gentlemen, TAKE A HINT! This is why newbies don't look long to
> the KCLUG for support, and quite possibly one of the reasons why people
> don't give Linux a second look. I have several friends whom I have
> directed
> to the KCLUG and after posting one or two questions to the list, have
> given
> up on the list. I no longer point non-technical people to the list as they
> get frustrated and offended. There it is.
>

I don't think a person who can write this (emphasis mine) is a 'newbie'.

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.
> >
> >
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.

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.

I've heard good things about SpinRite <http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm>, 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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