Computer Hardware Support - Re: Hard Disk requalification

Computer Hardware Support - Re: Hard Disk requalification

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:31:41 -0400, "William W. Plummer"
wrote:

>Ian East wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have many hard disks that I must re-qualify (they are old and can
>> not easily be replaced). Does anyone know of a good way of
>> requalifying IDE hard disks on an x86 system? The OS doesn't matter
>> as I can use Linux, Windows, Solaris x86, etc... The test should at
>> least write the entire surface of the disk, read the entire surface of
>> the disk, do random seek tests, and "exercise" the disk for 12 hours
>> or so. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've tried some of the
>> various benchmarking programs like bonnie++, iozone, etc... but have
>> not quite found something that suitable specifically for
>> re-qualification.
>
>What does "re-qualification" mean? I believe you can run a program to
>say how many sectors are good or bad. And you can verify that there
>are no errors during an X-hour run. But when I purchase a drive, I'm
>looking for an indication that the drive will continue to serve me for
>some number of years in the future. I want to know how many hours are
>on the bearings, whether it has been operated in a high temperature
>environment that might have left the electronic components dried out.

Re-qualification means putting the disk through approximately the same
tests that the manufacturer uses to qualify the disk in the first
place. Seeing how many sectors are good or bad is not quite what
we're after. What we're looking for is some way to put a disk through
a run, get some statistical data, then try to determine the
probability that a disk is going to fail. Disk age is a useful
statistic, but in this case we have not been able to determine a
strict relationship between age and disks that have failed in the
past.