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. > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >