[lug] Hard drive testing tools

[Chris Riddoch]

I spent some time with the folks at bococo last weekend, and was asked
about how to test the various hard drives they've been donated.  It's
quite a variety they have: SCSI, PATA, SATA drives of all different
sizes.  Some are practically new, others are well worn-in.

My best guess, based on old information in my head, was to run
badblocks on the drives, but I also know that there's something wrong
with just using badblocks, though I don't recall what.

To those of you working with lots of hard drives, what do you use to
evaluate the quality of a disk?

-- 
Chris Riddoch