please recommend a disk-exercising program?

[Glen Barber]

Hi, John

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 5:43 AM, John .<comp.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> Can anyone please recommend to me a program that will stress-test a
> disk? If it matters, two are connected by firewire, another via usb.
> Filesystem is ufs. I think I have a disk that might be about to fail,
> but it only sometimes errors when under stress. I need to see if it
> was a fluke or to really make it fail, so that I can get rid of it.
>

You can use dd(1) to stress test disk I/O.  Something like this should work:

dd if=/dev/${YOURDISK} of=/dev/null bs=1024k

-- 
Glen Barber
http://www.dev-urandom.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/glenjbarber