disko-san is a simple CLI tool to check the sanity of new hard drives.
The sanity check is done by writing random data to the disk, which is afterwards read and verified by chunk checksums. Data is written as 4 MiB chunks, each one consisting of a 4 byte checksum plus random data. The checksum allows to check if the the chunk is valid or if the data has been corrupted.
If provided with a STATE file, disko-san can stop and resume its operation afterwards. This is useful for large disks, where the host system requires to undergo system shutdown, reboot or any other kind of interruption. disko-san will be able to resume the process, where it was terminated before.
In addition, disko-san can log write performance metrics to a file. This PERFLOG can be used to check if the write performance of the disk remains stable throughout the whole disk capacity. This is useful to check for bad disk parts, where the write performance might not be stable.
disko-san DISK [STATE] [PERFLOG]
DISK defines the disk under test
STATE progress file, required for resume operations
PERFLOG write performance (write metrics) to this file
Example
To analyze the disk /dev/sdh and save the progress to /home/phoenix/disk_sdh but no PERFLOG file do
disko-san /dev/sdh /home/phoenix/disk_sdh
To include the performance log and write it to /home/phoenix/perf_sdh do
disko-san /dev/sdh /home/phoenix/disk_sdh disko-san /dev/sdh /home/phoenix/perf_sdh
When using the performance log, keep in mind to keep the state and perflog files on a different disk to not influce the ongoing measurement with the constant rewrites of those files. In principle the amount of writes needed is 3 orders of magnitude smaller due to the chunk size, but the effect is not negligible and it is a bad practise.
analyse.py is a small python script to analyse the PERFLOG. It prints the min,max and average values of different subsets of all values (99% values and 68% values)
./analyse.py PERFLOG
disko-san is written in plain go without additional requirements:
go build ./...
or the lazy way
make
The software is provided as-is without any warranty of claims to be correct or even working at all. I'm a random dude from the internet, and probably should not be trusted when it comes to the sanity of your own hard disks :-)