need to stress a HDD!

[litehedded]

can you recommend an app to continuously stress a HDD for a couple of days?
I'm trying to figure out if the format and reinstall solved the problems of this machine or if it was a physical problem with the disk.
i need to figure this out to see if I can give it to one of my users or not

 

[ashmedai]

Seatools / appropriate analogue sounds appropriate. You don't really want to "stress" it so much as test it with rigor.

 

[drizzt81]

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a memtest equivalent tool for a hdd:
use dd to write all zeroes.
read back each sector, compare to zero
use dd to write all ones.
read back each sector, compare to one
... etc.

I would recommend the manufacturer's diagnostic though.

 

[ChingChang]

there are programs that stress different internal parts of the hard drive and also check the platters for errors and seek times and transfer speeds. I'll have to look them up another time.

There's also a program you can run in Windows called IOMeter that you can set to run different tests for specified amount of time. I've used it only a few times and I'm not familiar with it, but it might be worth checking out.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

hehehe I have the perfect tool.

The Whitney Defrag tool can do what you're looking for in spades.

Tiny little command line application, only 164KB or so. Set it up, and copy a DVD or two to that hard drive you want to test, a bunch of the 1GB VOB files should work nicely, you can figure out how to do that.

Use the defragger's "Shotgun blast" option which will purposely fragment the data on the drive to the absolute max, and it typically takes hours if not days to do a full fragmentation run.

I did that recently on an older 5400 rpm drive, 20GB partition, one single 1GB VOB file. After 33 hours that one single file was shredded, aka "shotgun blasted" into 262K fragments, the theoretical maximum on that partition and for a 1GB file (1GB / 4096 bytes per cluster = 262K fragments possible). I use that partition now (safely imaged) as a testing partition for defragmenter performance.

Read the options for the Whitney defrag and learn how to use it. Honestly there is nothing out there that I've found that will stress the drive mechanics more than that tiny little kick ass application. When you set it off on a fragmentation run like I did, it's a read/write/read/write constant cycle until it's done, and the heads end up moving everywhere on the surface of the platters, constantly - it never stops until the "shotgun blast" is complete, and it will fragment a file into it's maximum possible fragments based on filesize and clustersize.

If you ever wanted to just wear out a hard drive, this app is the one that can do it.

Hope this helps...