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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Can application load testing cause drives to fail?

June 15th, 2021, 12:09

I have been doing application testing for 20 years and did disk control unit testing for 10 years. I want to run a web application performance test for a client, but their operations contractor says that running the performance test could cause drives to fail. I've never heard this concern in all my years. Is there any merit to it? I mean, I could say that if their drives are that close to failure they'd probably want to know sooner rather than later. But really, could just running the application at load measurably increase the likelihood of drive failure? I'm skeptical. It's not like we would be stress testing a drive by forced repetitive seeks to inner and outer cylinders. Thanks for any thoughts/data/experience.

Re: Can application load testing cause drives to fail?

June 15th, 2021, 12:41

Mechanical- sounds like an excuse to me. Technically virtually anything (and nothing) can cause a drive to fail but I'd certainly want to know if my application was going to kill the hardware it was running on if it was put under load. Id be discussing this with the client along with their choice of hardware if it poses a risk to their application.

Solid Sate - Potentially some merit to what they're say if the concern is about shortening lifespan (wearleveling etc) of the drive for what they might consider unnecessary testing. Again, another chat with the client about hardware suitability and scalability.

I'd be asking the operations contractor some more detailed questions about exactly their concern is and what their plan is to mitigate those failures in a real world scenario.

Re: Can application load testing cause drives to fail?

June 15th, 2021, 14:49

A hard drive should be able to withstand repetitive full stroke seeks and butterfly tests.
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