[lug] Hard drive testing tools

[Aaron Nichols]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Chris Riddoch <riddochc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

We run burn-in tests on new drives (as we add a lot of them regularly)
using bonnie++. It's more intended as a performance testing tool, but
it works pretty well to exercise a disk. You'll have to play with the
options that work best and it's not going to "auto-adjust" to all the
different types of disks you may work with - so YMMV. Unfortunately I
haven't found a lot of good recipes for using bonnie++ and would love
to think there's a more appropriate tool out there - but in the
absence of any other suggestions it's worth checking out.

Also - bonnie doesn't scan the disk for errors - it just tries to
read/write data in a variety of different patterns to simulate real
world patterns that measure different performance characteristics.
Unless the disk fails in a major way (I/O errors or otherwise)
bonnie++ may not expose subtle errors.

Aaron