[LUNI] Testing IDE drives

[Tim Born]

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".
>
>"badblocks" looks OK to me for that purpose - any other suggestions?
>
>If using badblocks is it worth to first do a "read only scan" before going to mode where blocks are written out to disk and then read back in?
>The "read in all the blocks mode" seems to be much faster, but if that skips over more than 20% of the errors that would be discovered with
>"write and read", then I am not interested.
>
>Thanks.
>
>StvB
>
smartmontools
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/

It provides access to the internal disk diagnostics.  When my disks are 
*thinking* of failing and report it through smartmon, I've never had a 
vendor reject a warranty replacement before the actual failure by 
including a copy of the smartmon report.

best,
-tim


-- 
Tim Born
Alcatel-Lucent Ventures (ALV)
timborn at alcatel-lucent.com
+1 630/979-3118
--
"Not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for
patent infringement, much less be found to infringe, while proprietary
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-Dan Ravicher, author of the OSRM study and the executive director of
the Public Patent Foundation

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