On 12/18/2010 03:19 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> I have an older hard drive (WD1200VE - 120 GB) that use to be in my laptop,
> but I ran out of room so I replaced it with a larger drive. I have the
> WD1200 in one of those nifty ez-upgrade USB drive enclosures and it mounts
> and works just fine. I need some portable back up space, so I thought I
> would use this drive. However, I would like to test it (thoroughly, whatever
> that means) to see if it has any problems before I use it as a backup drive.
> I am looking for either a command line tool or gui that I can run on a
> Debian machine to exercise the drive and find any errors. An automated test
> suite that I can setup and run in the background (ie does not suck up the
> whole machine to run it) for a few hours/days to test the drive, log errors,
> fix those errors that can be fixed, etc.
>
> I can't use the WD diags for the drive since my Windows machine will not
> recognize the drive in its usb caddy. I looked at bonnie++ and I can't find
> a way to tell it to test a usb drive instead of the drive with the root file
> system. Bonnie is also a benchmarking program and not really a drive stress
> test program.
>
> Any recommendations? I don't care about the data on the drive now, as I have
> sucked it all off to my new hard drive.

Try smartctl from the smartmontools package. There are tests you can run 
(short/long) which may be helpful. Also check the Reallocated Sector 
Count and be wary if you see any reallocated sectors.

Keep in mind that a drive can go south with no advance warning 
whatsoever, and the older the drive, the more likely that can happen.

Scott

-- 
Scott Garman
sgarman at zenlinux dot com
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