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ncw / stressdisk

Stress test your disks / memory cards / USB sticks before trusting your valuable data to them
MIT License
361 stars 27 forks source link

Any particular reason to use this app over badblocks on linux? #7

Closed mafrosis closed 7 years ago

mafrosis commented 7 years ago

Thanks for building!

mafrosis commented 7 years ago

I should read the README in full first

ncw commented 7 years ago

This app tries a lot harder to find bad stuff than badblocks and will write data to the filesystem to find it.

grahamperrin commented 3 years ago

https://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks badblocks(8) can test the entirety of a disk – without overwriting user data, if run with care.

stressdisk can test the free space within a file system, so it's best suited to an empty file system that occupies as much as possible of the device.

daboross commented 3 years ago

@grahamperrin I think there is the significant advantage of stressdisk being a stress tool as well, though. It doesn't just test each block with different patterns, it specifically tries to overload the kernel & usb device, so if any bugs show up under extreme pressure, they become apparent.

badblocks simply tests each block with different patterns. That picks up if any segment of the drive is always broken, but won't pick up anything that only appears under stress.

grahamperrin commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the additional explanation.

I think it will be useful to mention kernel overload (or words to that effect) under https://github.com/ncw/stressdisk#stressdisk

ncw commented 3 years ago

@grahamperrin if you'd like to suggest a fix, click the pencil icon on the top right and send a suggestion :-)