[gentoo-amd64] Re: Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Duncan]

"P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@×××××××××××.sg> posted
463017AD.7050401@×××××××××××.sg, excerpted below, on  Thu, 26 Apr 2007
11:08:29 +0800:

> Hi,
>
> Just got the Marvell 6145 chip to work using the patch from,
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=116986924301674&w=2
>
> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my
> hard disks.
>
> Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test for
> hard disk. Please note that the application should be command line as
> there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.

After having a hard drive go out on me a couple years ago, the second one 
in two years (that one overheated, after the AC went out here in Phoenix, 
so the room temp could well have been 60 C or higher, and no telling what 
the drive was), I decided to buy four SATA drives and RAID them together 
using the kernel RAID (md/mdp).  However, before I actually started 
installing anything on them, I ran badblocks on them, beginning to end, 
data destructive test (thus the before anything critical is on them is 
vitally important, tho badblocks does have a couple less intensive modes 
that aren't data destructive), multiple patterns, repeat-write one 
pattern one end of the disk to the other, read it back and verify, repeat-
write a second pattern, read and verify... IIRC there were four patterns 
in all, so eight times over the entire 300 gig, four writes, four reads, 
1.2 TB per drive, four drives, so 4.8 TB written and read.

Talking that sort of data transfer volume, it obviously took /days/, tho 
luckily I was able to test the four of them in parallel without adding to 
the time much, since the bottleneck was the disk read/write speed, not 
the bus or CPU speed.  Of course, that's 100% sequential access, so it 
didn't stress the seek mechanisms much, but it's also 100% duty cycle, /
days/ at a time (two and a half days, IIRC), so it certainly well tested 
the data path, that is, the chipset, the low level drivers, the i/o path 
electronics on the drive itself, the read/write heads and disk platters.  
All four disks passed without incident, so I felt reasonably secure in 
using them for mixed RAID.  FWIW, RAID-6 for the main system, so I can 
lose two drives without losing data.

badblocks is part of e2fsprogs, so there's a good chance you have it 
already merged. =8^)  The badblocks manpage tells you what you need to 
know to run the tests, both destructive and not.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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