How to fill up a hard drive and exercise it at the same time. Comments?

[BigXor]

I was Googling and found a neat little batch file to fill and exercise a hard drive or array:

1.) Copy the following lines to Notepad and then save it as a file called t.bat on the drive(s) to test.
____________________
copy t.t + t.t t1.t
del t.t
ren t1.t t.t
dir
t.bat
_____________________

2.) Save the file and copy t.bat to t.t (you will have two files now)

3.) Start t.bat

The file will double in size every pass causing constant read/writes until the drive is full,
at which time the batch file will error out.

 

[Mike]

Badblocks

 

[BigXor]

Badblocks is a linux command?

 

[Chuckleb]

Yep. That's what I am doing on the white labels to test.

badblocks -p 100 -w /Dev/SDB

100 passes of destructive write. Then I monitor the drives for errors.

 

[Diavuno]

Any actual numbers on health with and without exercising?

 

[Mike]

Any actual numbers on health with and without exercising?

A disk will either survive the first sequence of abuse or it won't. If it fails right away than it is a good indication that it is junk. If it doesn't than that doesn't imply that the drive is good to go for the 3 year-or-so lifespan, but atleast that it is not a DOA, right?
The google research on disk failure is pretty interesting about it. I'm not sure but i think there were a bunch of other articles about it.

 

[Chuckleb]

There is an interesting formula that I found on Acronis' website that they use to calculate disk health. Could be interesting for others as well.

Acronis Drive Monitor: Disk Health Calculation | Knowledge Base

 

[BigXor]

For Windows users, I tried out Hard Disk Sentinel Pro on a couple old 15K Savvio drives.

Setting up drive testing in a write/read random pattern, the drive heads moved back and forth around the platters. First writing to all the sectors, then reading the same sectors in the same pattern. You can set the pattern to go from beginning to end, end to beginning, random, or butterfly. Repeat tests can be set to more than 1 at a time.

It was amusing listening to the heads flying around and chattering like a couple little chipmunks

Write test requires the Pro version, otherwise only read.

More than one instance can be opened to test many drives at the same time.

Program shows location of any bad or failing sectors, and calculates drive health percentage. Graphs show drive temperature and other statistics.

 

[Chuckleb]

Good idea, I'd like to find a way to do random read/write test as well. I don't think badblocks does that for Linux.