[plug] Stressing a disk

[Derek Fountain]

> Make two partitions of the same size and do:
>
> while true ; do
> 	dd if=/dev/hdN1 of=/dev/hdN2
> 	dd if=/dev/hdN2 of=/dev/hdN1
> 	md5sum /dev/hdN[12]
> done
>
> where N is the approriate letter.  I have no idea how stressfull that is on
> a disk?  It looks bad tho.

I like it! I don't think it's too stressful since all reads and writes will be 
contiguous, and the kernel and disk between them will make full use of large 
read ahead buffers and big write buffers. On the other hand, it'll read and 
write all the sectors nicely, which is what I want. Thanks!