Putting together a decent automated test suite is possible, but is a significant project for an individual drive reviewer. And any test suite you create is only

Putting together a decent automated test suite is possible, but is a significant project for an individual drive reviewer. And any test suite you create is only good for a few years at most before you have to start worrying about new technologies that change performance or power characteristics in a way your tests can't capture. If you were putting together a hard drive test suite a few years ago to use for reviewing consumer/prosumer desktop and NAS drives, testing specifically for SMR behavior may not have been on your radar. If you want to get really thorough, automation starts to be infeasible and unreliable: http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microbenchmarking/ http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2019/09/hard-disk-geometry-microb...