[Novalug] stress test a disk set-up

Ed James edward.james@gmail.com
Thu Mar 6 11:06:50 EST 2008


Megan

   Few suggestions, which all depend on your environment, of course.

If the drive will always be on, then there's no need to test up/down on
them.  Otherwise,
I'd make sure that they can indeed be shut down, brought back up with no ill
effects,
and also, how long does it take.  In particular, force a file check to see
how long
that takes.

If there's a UPS protecting the drives, then you won't need to crash-test
them much.
Otherwise, I'd literally pull the power cord (or flip the switch on the
surge protector)
while the system is running, to make sure the file system isn't corrupted.

I'd write a program to generate random files (about the size you intend to
really have)
and write them, as well as randomly delete existing files.  The goal is to
see how badly
the file system gets fragmented, and if fragmentation will need to be dealt
with or not.
It might be that even a badly fragmented drive doesn't slow your system down
enough
to matter.

At the same time. I'd have a program running which randomly selects files
and reads
from them, to make sure reads and writes don't step on each other.  Perhaps
the
creation program should put fixed strings at the beginning and end of each
file, which
the read-program would verify is still valid.

If you'll have any file-locking which needs to be done, lock them and have
somebody
deviously try to access the files.

Last thing I can think of before the 2 AM inspiration period hits is to test
your backup
program to see how it might impact normal operations.  If you do backups
when nothing
is being updated, prolly not gonna be a problem.  But I've seen systems
where a
running backup either locks itself up, or locks up something else when other
"stuff" is
going on.

Ed James

On 3/6/08, Megan Larko <larkoc@iges.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>
> Question:
> What is a good way in which to test the reliability of the new disk?
>
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