Stress testing/burning in HDDs

[Chuck Swiger]

On Sep 27, 2007, at 12:04 PM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>> It's reasonable to start with something like a:
>>
>>  dd if=/dev/your_disk of=/dev/null bs=5120
>>
>> ...to at least try reading every sector on the drive as a basic  
>> sanity check.
>
> why so small blocks of 10 sectors?
>
> i use bs=64k at least goes faster.

Agreed, but he asked for a stress-test-- arguably, hitting with a  
size of 512 might be better for that purpose than anything faster.  I  
chose 5120 because many ATA devices seem to have a maximum request/ 
DMA-transfer size of 16 sectors, and 512 * 10 is convenient and fits  
under that.

-- 
-Chuck