Exercising ATA disks in hopes of revealing errors

[Chuck Swiger]

On Apr 17, 2007, at 9:56 AM, Doug Poland wrote:
> I've just come into possesion of a bunch of 80GB ATA drives.  I'd like
> to quickly and efficiently test each drive to see if it's free of
> errors and suitable for deployment in non-critical workstations.
>
> Using FreeBSD 6.x as a testing platform, what tools do people use to
> stress-test disk drives?  I've searched ports and done some googling
> but nothing stands out.

sysutils/smartmontools will let you check the error counts recorded  
via SMART and let you invoke various self-tests and possibly a  
surface scan, depending on what the drive's firmware supports.   
However, to do more thorough testing, the (typically DOS-based)  
utility from the vendor will be somewhat better.

-- 
-Chuck