[Noisebridge-discuss] Linux disk stress test & burn-in

[Ronald Cotoni]

+1 to bonnie++.  I was just going to mention that utility :)

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>wrote:

> travis+ml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org writes:
>
> > Hey all,
> >
> > So I have some HDDs I want to pop in a file server, but I want to
> > stress-test them first to get them over the "bathtub curve".
> >
> > I assume I need to write to them over and over, and use SMART to
> > monitor for problems.
> >
> > smartmon + dd = okay, seems decent
> >
> > 1) Does anyone know a good tutorial on SMART
> >
> > But it'd be better to check for errors... write various patterns to do
> > this and then check the reads - right?
> >
> > 2) Does anyone know a Linux/BSD utility for this?
> >
> > Googled around to no avail.
>
> I think I want to suggest
>
> http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/
>
> which is meant as a speed tester, but should work the hard drive
> pretty well.
>
> Someone on Launchpad also mentioned to me that you can use
>
> udisks --show-info
>
> instead of smartmontools to get SMART data from the command line.
>
> It seems to me that trying to check for errors is very unlikely to
> find anything, because hard drives have extensive internal soft
> error correction.  The probability of an error that gets detected
> by the drive and reported to SMART must be _much_ higher than the
> probability of an error where bad data silently reaches the
> application.  Of course that kind of failure is possible, but it's
> hard to imagine that you could elicit it in practice within a
> few dozen hours of testing of a few hard drives!
>
> I would think on a modern drive the overwhelming majority of drive
> errors do get reported through SMART, although I don't know how
> to quantify "overwhelming majority".
>
> --
> Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>      |  No haiku patents
>     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/        |  means I've no incentive to
>  FD9A6AA28193A9F03D4BF4ADC11B36DC9C7DD150  |        -- Don Marti
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>



-- 
Ronald Cotoni
Systems Engineer
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