So you’ve a got a disk in your hand that’s new, used, or questionably refurbished, and you want to give it a thorough thrashing to see how it holds up before trusting your data to it. How? SMART tests and badblocks are the usual tools, but you really want to simulate a workload instead of just doing a linear once-over.
Fortunately, the fio benchmarking tool has a randrw module that can do exactly this. Run this and it will scribble all over a disk and check the results. You should then have a good idea whether that disk is a winner or a dud for a real world workload.
Example, assuming we will stress-test the disk for 1 day (86400 seconds), we have 4 CPU threads, and the disk to be tested is /dev/sdg (WARNING: all data on this disk will be randomly trashed):
# fio --name=randrw --time_based --runtime=86400 --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=64 --rw=randrw --bs=4k --direct=1 --numjobs=4 --filename=/dev/sdg