I assume you have the interface and power worked out. I'd simply boot up to Damn Small Linux off a USB stick, bring up 10 shell windows, and fire up a badblocks command in each window giving each a device for for each disk. I *think* SATA disks show up as SCSI disks (/dev/sda, /dev/hdb, etc)
http://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 12:55 PM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm going to be ordering about 100 hard drives in the next month or so to upgrade our desktops over the summer. I'd like to be able to put 10(or more) of these at a time in 2 enclosures(5-bays each) I have and run thorough surface scans on them before installing them. (30 of them are going into workstations that are mounted in a computer lab where the drives will be more difficult to remove later) I've used Spinrite for years, and actually got it running in several VMs under hyper-v, using pass-through disks. This works well because I can scan multiple drives at once, which really is necessary since one scan alone can take 50 hours. Spinrite just doesn't get the SMART data while in a VM, but I can do that in the host with a different app. I'm also a little concerned that write-caching in the host could interfere with the accuracy of the surface scan, but have no way to know since this is an unsupported configuration for that app. Do you guys know of any other apps out there similar to Spinrite, that I can hopefully run in the host instead of inside a VM? My main requirement is that I be able to scan multiple disks at once. Any other thoughts on this? Better way to approach it altogether? Thanks, Mike
