[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive testing

[Alvin Goats]

You might want to check out some of the hard drive manufacturers for
some tools, i.e.

Seagate's seatools for SCSI drives. Works best on their own drives, but
will do quite a bit of testing and drive performance tweaking of other
manufacturer's drives. Available in Linux as a Java based gui or a CLI.

IBM has/had some software for their SmartDrives (might have to go to
Hitachi now). Seems it was a Linux version.

Check out Adaptec for SCSI utilities. While basically aimed at SCSI card
utilities, there are some disk utilities that may be accessable outside
of rebooting and using the card's eprom utilities.

There are some DOS based packages packaged with some hard drives, like
the EZ-Drive or Drive Pro. They use a DOS bootable floppy disk to run
the software which can do some testing of read/write performance,
adjusting interleaves if possible, reading drive parameters, setting
drive parameters with some amount of sanity, etc.

Otherwise:

fdisk expert mode to set drive settings

hdparm to set other hard drive/cdrom settings

badblocks to do a more thorough testing of bad blocks

mkfs -c -t <filesystem> /dev/hdxx

Alvin