[lug] Hard drive testing tools

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Sat, 2010-06-19 at 12:54 -0600, Chris Riddoch 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?
> 

The hard drive manufacturers have test programs like Seagate's SeaTools
that will probe the drive and do various tests on it.  Quick tests will
just initiate S.M.A.R.T. firmware code on the drive to check things out
and long tests will test each sector of the drive reading and/or writing
data to see if there are bad sectors.  Before you can RMA a drive to get
a replacement under warranty they'll have you run one of these programs.
So I'd say if these programs fail a drive, you should fail it for use,
too.

If it passes you could then install it in a Linux system and write a few
basic scripts to give it a workout.

You can't run SeaTools (etc) on multiple drives at the same time, so for
those fairly old PCs that don't run Linux or Windows desktop well,
BoCoCo might consider using 5-6 of them just for hard drive testing.

BoCoCo sounds like something really fun to join soon..

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
========================================================================
        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
        LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellspangler