Stressing disks in OS X for burn-in
Sounds simple, you’d think doing drive burn-in for reliability is something people do everyday on Macs, but either my Google-foo is off or there’s just not an easy way to stress test disks. A drive just died from under two weeks use (note to self: don’t buy Iomega), so I’m forcing myself to put the replacement I received this morning through its paces before committing any data to it.
This external drive, for reasons of compatibility and account restrictions, needs to eventually be formatted on my Mac to ext2, using ext2fsx (another post on the bugginess of ext2fsx later). Below is a list of ways I ran across to stress the disk.
Ideas for stressing a disk on OS X:
- format the disk with “secure erase” to write dummy data to the entire disk
- just format the disk ext2/fsck it; the inode placement should give good coverage of the disk without taking SO LONG*
- run `e2fsck` (fsck_ext2) with the -c -c option which invokes badblocks to read/write each block to find and track bad blocks.
I started with the first, but realized badblocks is probably a better tool for the job (is there a native BSD equivalent?) save for the fact that you don’t get much seeking going on. The second one might address that, or maybe reading the disk’s block device while doing something else might induce the contention to give you the necessary seeking.
*A side gripe: since disk capacities (I have a 500GB external drive) have been growing faster than disk bandwidth (perhaps my fault for using 480Mbps USB2), reading or writing an entire drive takes on the order of HOURS (over two hours twenty minutes best case for my setup, and easily twice that from my experience today). It just never really affected me until now, and I’m kind of annoyed.