[svlug] Using Linux as a testing platform

[Tony Cappellini]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Chris Miller
<lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Sargun Dhillon <xbmodder at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What sort of tests are you planning on doing? Many R/W iterations? Shake
>> tests? Checking the response to a bad power supply?
>
> With the exception of the last one, those could all be done with a
> very simple series of shell scripts and C programs (shell script to
> mount the drive, format it, C program to stress-test R/W, shell script
> to unmount it, reformat it, etc.)
>
> Also consider using hdparm(?) and some other little gizmo I forgot the
> name of for monitoring the drives.

I will be stressing the interface as hard/fast as I can, so I 'm
looking for something to do that that provides control. However, when
there is a problem found with the drive (IE a host found data
miscompare, I need to be able to duplicate the commands that got me to
that point).

So I would be writing a unique pattern to the whole drive, then doing
various combinations of write/read compare, trying to break the
caching inthe drive
by hitting it as fast as possible, from different processes.

hdparm only provides minimal functionality, from what I remember.
Maybe it's evovled.