On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Robin Bowes wrote:

What's the best way to do get all six drives working as hard as possible?

I always run 'bonnie' on each partition (sometimes 2 to a partition) when
soak-testing a new server. Try to leave it running for as long as
possible. (ie. days)

That seems to get the disk heads moving (start the bonnies off at 1-2
minute interfals, but they desynchronise over time anyway, so some end up
reading, some writing, and some seeking) and I suspect head movement is
whats going to cause a disk drive to comsume the most current after
startup.

If I have a handy PC next to it, then I'll also run some scripted network
FTPs (via wget) of 1GB binary files copying to /dev/null on the recipient
side.

I certinaly see the motherboard temperature rise when I do this
(lm-sensors is your friend, but can be a PITA to get going)

Gordon