hard drive burn-in

[Matthew Gillen]

Tom Metro wrote:
> I picked up some refurbished hard drives for a personal project and was 
> curious to know what are your favorite tools and techniques for stress 
> testing a new drive? Some people do this as a matter of course on all 
> new drives. I've heard of SpinRite being used for this. As there isn't 
> any need for exhaustive data recovery attempts on a new drive, that 
> seems overkill. Probably using dd to write to every block of the raw 
> device, while using SMART monitoring to notify of any bad sectors ought 
> to do it.

I like to use SMART to do tests:
> long - runs SMART Extended Self Test...
>
> conveyance - [ATA ONLY] runs a SMART Conveyance Self Test (minutes).   This
> self-test  routine  is  intended  to  identify  damage incurred during
> transporting of the device...

Of course, you might still do the dd thing (or mkfs as Jarod suggested) to
write to every sector.  The 'long' SMART test reads every block on the disk,
and can take a very long time.

I have a cron job that runs a 'long' test every month on my file server, so I
guess it's not really a burn-in thing... :-)

Matt