Looking for utility to Test lots of hard drives

[MrBill]

I am contemplating purchasing a couple of the rack-mount fiber channel arrays that came in at the scrapyard, however, I would like to test the drives first so i can pay accordingly to how many drives are actually working. They are all loaded with 450GB drives. On linux the badblocks utility seems like it would be the utility of choice to write data to the drives, and map out bad blocks,and determine which drives are failing junk, however I only have a fibre channel card for my octane. What would be the best way to go about this?

It looks like fx might be able to do it, although i am uncertain as to if it can determine a drive is giving to many errors and give a warning that it is bad.
I am open to suggestions as to how i could test a big batch of the fibre channel drives, if possible something i could combine in a script and test the drives in a batch. The badblocks utility seem like it would do the job, however I am uncertain of if it is even possible to port to irix, and i am not yet compiler savvy enough to go and try to port something.

[jan-jaap]

First of all: often these arrays come from SAN servers. Especially the more high end SAN servers format the disk for block sizes other than the usual 512 bytes/block. If that's the case you'd have to low level format the disks to 512 bytes/block.

Otherwise it's just a matter of exercising the disks. IRIX 'fx' can do that; from the fx prompt select 'exercise, 'sequential, "write-compare" and wait. If it doesn't throw errors the disk should generally be OK. You can run multiple instances of fx to test multiple disks simultaneously.

I do that with any disk I get for my SGIs (the exercising bit, not the low level format).

[MrBill]

What is on the disks is not important, just left over files from the previous owners, I will low level format a few and exercise them and see how it goes. thanks for the info.