badblocks has a destructive write mode. It writes numbers to disk then reads them back a while later and tells you if they differ. That seems to work hard drive

badblocks has a destructive write mode. It writes numbers to disk then reads them back a while later and tells you if they differ. That seems to work hard drives fairly hard - they warm up at least. A day is usually how long my patience lasts. There are probably better stress test approaches out there. The basic idea is to find out if your drive is one that'll die early before putting a load of data you want to keep on it. I don't do this to ssd as they have lowish write limits anyway, so I just assume any data written to a ssd will vanish at some point. Hard drives in a network share, ssd in dev machines treated as scratch storage.