Hard drives

Measuring drive performance

• A basic Linux utility to measure drive latency and throughput, and record these continuously.
  • http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/readme.html
  • http://linuxappfinder.com/utilities/benchmarks

Thrash the drive

Drive thrashing should involve the looping creation (write) and md5sum (read) and then deletion of files of random sizes. Data from /dev/urandom.

• Is this efficient really?

Magnets

What I have never seen is testing of magnets on drives. Now, I have alot of nice strong rare-earth magnets (from hard drives), 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
• test the effect of a moving magnetic field, vs a static one (as applied both before and after a format of the drive?)

foreign materials

• open breather hole, apply smoke
  • thrash drive - how long till observable issues?
• open breather hole, but apply coke (alternate: drill hole)
  • will it seize up the drive? Or froth up the coke?
• sparkler (inverted, through pre-drilled hole)

Open drive

• open drive entirely... :)
  • create two partitions, then read/write files on both to observe :D
  • apply soot to drive platters, then see patterns with head movement...