In my former life as a test engineer for a disk company, we used custom testers to stress-test. That eventually moved to custom code loaded directly on the device to do the work. When I moved to Linux we used direct-io libraries to write and read/verify random or patterned data to the drive; in both seq, random and butterfly. Low-level tools like the sg3-utils have a large set of direct disk access tools. Other tools to use are IOZone and FIO to run a large sample of tests over and over again.
On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 10:30 PM Galen Seitz <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9/2/20 9:43 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > I bought an 8TB Seagate USB3 drive Real Cheap at Costco, > > which I will eventually "shuck" to get at the SATA hard > > drive inside. > > > > Voiding the hell out of the warranty, so I would like to > > stress test it for a few months before I open the case. > > There are many tools (like bonnie++) that can thrash a > > hard drive, but they use more CPU than I would like. > > > > Is there a non-intrusive command-line hard drive test tool > > that can stress-test a hard drive for months with minimal > > CPU and RAM activity? How do server farms stress test > > incoming drives before committing important data to them? > > I'm guessing it probably doesn't meet your criteria for a stress test, > but the SMART long test won't load your system at all, since it is > performed by the drive itself. I don't know how well the SMART tests > work over a USB interface. I think there was a time when smartctl > wouldn't work over USB, but that may have been solved long ago. > > There's also the badblocks command. I don't know how much it would load > your system, but I bet it would be less than a program like bonnie which > tests performance. > > galen > -- > Galen Seitz > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
