[plug] system burn-in software for Linux - recommendations?

[Daniel Foote]

> Memory - memtest86 still seems to have good reports that I can see.   What
> about CPU, mobo and especially hard disk test suites?    The RAID5 will
> have 0.6TB available and is composed of SATA drives.   The system drive is
> PATA.   CPU is not overclocked.

At the end of last year I built myself a new fileserver, and I bought
7 SATA hard disks for it. The disks were ordered seperately from the
rest of the hardware, and they arrived a month ahead of the rest of
the machine.

Because I had all this time to kill, I tested all the drives. The
method I used was badblocks in destructive-write mode (as the disks
were not yet in use).

badblocks -svw /dev/sdX

will invoke the test. The test does five passes: on each pass it
writes a pattern to every sector on the disk, and then reads them back
off the disk.

CAUTION: THIS WILL WIPE THE CONTENTS OF THE DISK.

I ended up finding two faulty disks in my batch of 7 this way. One
would (repeatably) get through 80% of a single pass, and then reads or
writes to any sector would fail. The disk also passed Seagate's SMART
check tool (so it thought the disk was ok) - I sent it back to Seagate
and they did replace it. (I assume they do a more advanced test than
with the tool released for public use).

The other drive that failed would work for something like 2 passes,
and then failed until it was turned off and back on again (even for a
few seconds). This one took 4 hours to complete the Seagate SMART
check tool (on a long test which should take 20 minutes). Seagate also
replaced this drive.

The replacement drives were tested using the same method and they
passed. There is now 6 drives in the server, and I've had zero issues
with them.

Hope this helps...

Daniel Foote.