Hard drives

testing on harddrives....

Magnets

What I have never seen is testing of magnets on drives. Now, I have alot of nice strong rare-earth magnets, and I have some old drives which are all but ready to be decomissioned.

Testing external magnetic effects on Hard drives

1. setup computer with an OS and boot drive.
2. attach drive-to-test
3. format drive
4. write data, md5sum written data
5. bring magnets to drive
6. md5sum data again to check against bit corruption
7. consider 'spamsum' to check for how MUCH of the data is corrupted.

• consider applying all this in a loop which runs constant, generating files (/proc/partitions), md5sum, wait for magnets, md5sum again, delete and repeat
• 10meg files?
• test for effects of magnetic field when writing files as well as reading

foreign materials

• open breather hole, apply smoke
• open breather hole, but apply coke alternate: drill hole)

Open drive

• open drive entirely simply to watch movement :)
  • apply soot to drive platters