[CentOS] Looking for a good disk exerciser

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 at 11:15am, 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 (!).

Run 'smartctl -a' on the disk, which should tell you exactly what SMART is 
complaining about.  You can also run Seagate's disk testing tool (which 
should be somewhere on their web site) on the disk, which may give you a 
code to use when you RMA 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?

There's always benchmarking tools (like bonnie++ and tiobench), and/or 
the whole system tester at 
<http://people.redhat.com/dledford/memtest.html>.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University