[LUNI] Testing IDE drives

[Martin Maney]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 08:51:07AM -0700, Stephan V Bechtolsheim wrote:
> What's the best utility to use to test an IDE drive? I don't care
> about the info that is stored on the IDE drive. I just want to run a
> program and get an answer along the lines of "keep" or "throw away".

If SMART has been enabled, then you might find some indications in the
information it's gathered about the drive's operation using smartctl. 
The man page attempts to explain a bit about what's going on there, and
this paper from Google has a lot of interesting things to say abouf
SMART and drive failure prediction:

  http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that they found that over half of all
failures had no visible indication in the SMART data; still, the flip
side is that about half the time there may be clues.

-- 
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is
no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. -- JKG