[gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[P.V.Anthony]

Hi,

Just got the Marvell 6145 chip to work using the patch from,
http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=116986924301674&w=2

Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my 
hard disks.

Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test for 
hard disk. Please note that the application should be command line as 
there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.

P.V.Anthony
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Joshua Hoblitt]

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On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 11:08:29AM +0800, P.V.Anthony wrote:
> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my 
> hard disks.

You could yell at it and telling it that it's a "very bad disk" and that
it'll just be obsolete a week from Tuesday.  If that's a rigorous enough
stress test, you try could pounding on it with a framing hammer or giving it
a bath. ;)

-J

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Daniel Iliev]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:08:29 +0800
"P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@singnet.com.sg> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Just got the Marvell 6145 chip to work using the patch from,
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=116986924301674&w=2
> 
> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my 
> hard disks.
> 
> Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test
> for hard disk. Please note that the application should be command
> line as there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.
> 
> P.V.Anthony


There is a whole category of benchmarking progs in portage:

emerge -s @app-benchmarks

or if you would like some filtering:

emerge -s  @app-benchmarks | egrep -iB5 hard\|drive\|hdd\|disk


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Best regards,
Daniel

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Peter Davoust]

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I like the last two ideas, send me pictures once you've tried it. Seriously,
there must be some way to "overclock" your data bus, other than that I'm not
sure there's much you can do with hard disks. As far as I know that kind of
stuff is governed by the CPU, so overclocking the CPU might give you're
drive a run for it's money, although I imagine motherboards these days are
smarter than the 8085 board sitting on my desk. Realisticly, the only way I
could see stress testing them would be through some kind of overclocking or
pulling clocking capacitors from your motherboard which I'm assuming you
don't want to do. Why do you want to stress test them anyway?

-Peter

On 4/25/07, Joshua Hoblitt <jhoblitt@ifa.hawaii.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 11:08:29AM +0800, P.V.Anthony wrote:
> > Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my
> > hard disks.
>
> You could yell at it and telling it that it's a "very bad disk" and that
> it'll just be obsolete a week from Tuesday.  If that's a rigorous enough
> stress test, you try could pounding on it with a framing hammer or giving
> it
> a bath. ;)
>
> -J
>
> --
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Drew]

> Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test for
> hard disk. Please note that the application should be command line as
> there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.

I don't know about stress testing software but I had a handy little
tarball I decompress to stress test storage hardware. 4GB worth of
1kB--4kB gif images spread across 40 folders. Decompress that to an
ext3 partition, serve it over a network to a windows machine using
samba, and tell windows to view the remote folder in thumbnail view.
Already proven one hardware RAID card wasn't up to the task. :D


-Drew
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Wil Reichert]

On 4/25/07, Drew <drew.kay@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test for
> > hard disk. Please note that the application should be command line as
> > there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.
>
> I don't know about stress testing software but I had a handy little
> tarball I decompress to stress test storage hardware. 4GB worth of
> 1kB--4kB gif images spread across 40 folders. Decompress that to an
> ext3 partition, serve it over a network to a windows machine using
> samba, and tell windows to view the remote folder in thumbnail view.
> Already proven one hardware RAID card wasn't up to the task. :D

app-benchmarks/stress

and

app-benchmarks/bonnie++

have worked well for me.

Wil
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[gentoo-amd64] Re: Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Duncan]

"P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@singnet.com.sg> posted
463017AD.7050401@singnet.com.sg, excerpted below, on  Thu, 26 Apr 2007
11:08:29 +0800:

> Hi,
> 
> Just got the Marvell 6145 chip to work using the patch from,
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=116986924301674&w=2
> 
> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my
> hard disks.
> 
> Please share some links to applications that can do some stress test for
> hard disk. Please note that the application should be command line as
> there is no GUI like KDE or Gnome.

After having a hard drive go out on me a couple years ago, the second one 
in two years (that one overheated, after the AC went out here in Phoenix, 
so the room temp could well have been 60 C or higher, and no telling what 
the drive was), I decided to buy four SATA drives and RAID them together 
using the kernel RAID (md/mdp).  However, before I actually started 
installing anything on them, I ran badblocks on them, beginning to end, 
data destructive test (thus the before anything critical is on them is 
vitally important, tho badblocks does have a couple less intensive modes 
that aren't data destructive), multiple patterns, repeat-write one 
pattern one end of the disk to the other, read it back and verify, repeat-
write a second pattern, read and verify... IIRC there were four patterns 
in all, so eight times over the entire 300 gig, four writes, four reads, 
1.2 TB per drive, four drives, so 4.8 TB written and read.

Talking that sort of data transfer volume, it obviously took /days/, tho 
luckily I was able to test the four of them in parallel without adding to 
the time much, since the bottleneck was the disk read/write speed, not 
the bus or CPU speed.  Of course, that's 100% sequential access, so it 
didn't stress the seek mechanisms much, but it's also 100% duty cycle, /
days/ at a time (two and a half days, IIRC), so it certainly well tested 
the data path, that is, the chipset, the low level drivers, the i/o path 
electronics on the drive itself, the read/write heads and disk platters.  
All four disks passed without incident, so I felt reasonably secure in 
using them for mixed RAID.  FWIW, RAID-6 for the main system, so I can 
lose two drives without losing data.

badblocks is part of e2fsprogs, so there's a good chance you have it 
already merged. =8^)  The badblocks manpage tells you what you need to 
know to run the tests, both destructive and not.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[Bob Sanders]

P.V.Anthony, mused, then expounded:
> 
> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my 
> hard disks.
>

Give xdd a try - http://www.ioperformance.com/

It's scriptable, works on single drives as well as huge NAS setups.
And it's an accepted benchmarking tool.

Bob 
-  
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[P.V.Anthony]

On this day, 26-April-2007 11:45 AM,  Peter Davoust wrote:
> I like the last two ideas, send me pictures once you've tried it. 
> Seriously, there must be some way to "overclock" your data bus, other 
> than that I'm not sure there's much you can do with hard disks. As far 
> as I know that kind of stuff is governed by the CPU, so overclocking the 
> CPU might give you're drive a run for it's money, although I imagine 
> motherboards these days are smarter than the 8085 board sitting on my 
> desk. Realisticly, the only way I could see stress testing them would be 
> through some kind of overclocking or pulling clocking capacitors from 
> your motherboard which I'm assuming you don't want to do. Why do you 
> want to stress test them anyway?

Just wanted to be sure that I patched the kernel properly. I patched it 
manually. So I am not sure if I have done everything correctly.

Want to be sure that the drives will not just unmount or hang.

P.V.Anthony
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard Drive Stress Test Application

[P.V.Anthony]

On this day, 26-April-2007 9:53 PM,  Bob Sanders wrote:
> P.V.Anthony, mused, then expounded:
>> Now I need to test to see if it works under stress conditions for my 
>> hard disks.
>>
> 
> Give xdd a try - http://www.ioperformance.com/
> 
> It's scriptable, works on single drives as well as huge NAS setups.
> And it's an accepted benchmarking tool.

Thank you for the link.

I am using it now and am happy with it.

Once again thank you.

P.V.Anthony

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