Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:27:22 -0500 From: Doug Poland <doug@polands.org> To: "illoai@gmail.com" <illoai@gmail.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, Derek Ragona <derek@computinginnovations.com> Subject: Re: Exercising ATA disks in hopes of revealing errors Message-ID: <20070418192722.GA52435@polands.org> In-Reply-To: <d7195cff0704180946kade1d52wa96f0dd5ad71e280@mail.gmail.com> References: <52060.69.129.174.18.1176828969.squirrel@email.polands.org> <6.0.0.22.2.20070417134620.0261dac0@mail.computinginnovations.com> <d7195cff0704180946kade1d52wa96f0dd5ad71e280@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 11:46:50AM -0500, illoai@gmail.com wrote: > On 17/04/07, Derek Ragona <derek@computinginnovations.com> wrote: > >At 11:56 AM 4/17/2007, Doug Poland wrote: > >>Hello, > >> > >>I've just come into possesion of a bunch of 80GB ATA drives. I'd > >>like to quickly and efficiently test each drive to see if it's free > >>of errors and suitable for deployment in non-critical workstations. > >> > >>Using FreeBSD 6.x as a testing platform, what tools do people use to > >>stress-test disk drives? I've searched ports and done some googling > >>but nothing stands out. > > > >Use the manufacture's utilities to test the drives. Each > >manufacturer has bootable test and stress utilities. > > > I have used this: > http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ > That is packed full with nice stuff. Thanks > AFIK, there isn't much in FreeBSD for this sort of low level > diagnostics, ubcd boots faster, and given a decent junk machine, you > can test 3 hard drives per reboot*. If you can hunt down a pci ata > card, you can probably manage quite a few more. > > Having an 80-wire cable is nice for some of the diagnostics (if your > junk machine isn't very old it will be pretty unlikely to have a 40 > wire cable, so ignore this anyway). > > If you really want to use freebsd, the other suggestions to use > ports/sysutils/smartmontools and dd (personally I use > ports/sysutils/sdd for its -inull flag) are probably what I would > follow. > I don't have to run FreeBSD as the host, I just thought there would be some good tools to accomplish the task. The idea of a bootable CD-ROM is nice cause that gives me 4 empty ATA "sockets" for testing in my test machine. -- Regards, Doug
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