[CentOS] Looking for a good disk exerciser

[Rubin]

Hi,

To exercise the disk you could use a tool like iozone3. It's intended to
give you a broad overview of io/disk performance. Obviously you could use
badblocks to read/write every sector of the disk which will exercise it
quite well, however with both tools I would advise to make sure you have a
backup of stuff first.

Also, iozone is not intended to do anything related to disk errors or
other io failures; it might just uncover when/how and error occurs
coincedentally. With badblocks, it might show io errors at a certain part
of the disk.

I've had SMART errors on disks that would still work for about a year
after the first warning came up, however it is usually not a good sign for
long term operation of the device(tm).

Grtz,


Rubin.

> Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
>> I recently added a Seagate 400Gb SATA drive to my system, and it has
>> been behaving strangely since I put it in.  for one thing, the BIOS
>> S.M.A.R.T. came up with a warning the last time I booted with it
>> enabled, saying that I should backup my data and replace the disk (!).
>>
>> I still have not made any irreversible data transfers to this drive, and
>> I have some time yet to take it back, but I'd like to know for sure that
>> it needs it, or at least have some reasonable evidence of failure.
>>
>> What is a good program out there that exercises a disk to give some
>> assurance of errors or lack thereof?
>
> I found that older versions of smartmontools (even the one included with
> CentOS 5) do not handle newer onboard SataII controllers. In my case,
> one system is running CentOS 4 -- that motherboard has an Nvidia MCP
> northbridge (sata_nv). I ended up building kernel 2.6.20.1 to get it
> working better. My other machine has an Intel P965 Express northbridge.
> In the former case I downloaded the smartmontools-5.37.2 source and
> built it; in the latter I downloaded the fedora core 7 development
> source rpm for smartmontools (also 5.37-2). In both cases smartctl -a
> started working properly with the combo a newer kernel and latest
> version of smartmontools.
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