[CentOS] Looking for a good disk exerciser

Fri Apr 13 06:08:53 UTC 2007
Peter Gross <pag at nanosec.com>

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.