disktest - Hard Disk (HDD), Solid State Disk (SSD), USB Stick, Memory Card (e.g. SD-Card) tester

https://bues.ch/h/disktest

Disktest is a tool to check Hard Disks, Solid State Disks, USB sticks, SD cards or similar storage media for errors.

It does so by writing a pseudo random sequence to the device and then reading it back and verifying it to the expected pseudo random sequence.

This tool can be used to:

• Check disks for hardware errors (e.g. platter errors, Flash errors, etc…).
• Overwrite storage media with a cryptographically strong pseudo random stream. This can either be used to delete existing data on the disk, or to prepare the disk for encryption.
• Test for tampered media that pretend to have more storage area than they physically actually have. Sometimes such media are sold by fraudulent sellers for cheap prices.
• … probably lots of other tasks.

The random number stream is a concatenation of hashes generated by the following algorithm:

S = PBKDF2(SEED | THREAD_ID)
HASH_DATA = SHA512(S | PREVIOUS_HASH_DATA | MONOTONIC_INC_COUNTER)

If more than one thread is used, then each thread generates such a hash stream, which are then interleaved in a regular pattern.

The algorithm can also be switched to a CRC based algorithm, that is much faster, but not cryptographically secure. However CRC is sufficient to find physical disk errors. Disktest defaults to the secure SHA512 based algorithm.

Dependencies

• Rust (edition 2018) or later.
• Crate dependencies will automatically be downloaded by cargo.

Running without installing

Build and run disktest in place without installing it:

cargo run --release --  DISKTEST_OPTIONS_HERE

See below for a description of the available disktest options.

Installing

Build disktest and install it to $HOME/.cargo/bin:

cargo install --path .

Disktest command line options

Please run either of the following commands to show more information about the available command line options.

cargo run --release -- --help
cargo run --release -- -h
disktest --help
disktest -h

Speed

The following table shows some example speed measurements of disktest in various operation mode on different hardware.

These speed tests don’t write to an actual disk, but only to the /dev/null device, which is a device that does nothing. So these speed test results do not include the speed limits of any actual disk hardware.

Command	Algorithm	Hardware	Data rate written
disktest -j6 -w /dev/null	SHA512	AMD Phenom II X6 1090T; 6 cores 3.2 GHz	675 MiB/s
disktest -j6 -ACRC -w /dev/null	CRC	AMD Phenom II X6 1090T; 6 cores 3.2 GHz	4.6 GiB/s
disktest -j4 -w /dev/null	SHA512	Intel i5-3320M; 2+2 cores 2.6 GHz	250 MiB/s
disktest -j4 -ACRC -w /dev/null	CRC	Intel i5-3320M; 2+2 cores 2.6 GHz	3.4 GiB/s
disktest -j4 -w /dev/null	SHA512	Raspberry Pi 4; 4 cores 1.5 GHz	75 MiB/s
disktest -j4 -ACRC -w /dev/null	CRC	Raspberry Pi 4; 4 cores 1.5 GHz	605 MiB/s

The read data rates are similar, because the algorithm used is exactly the same.

Note: The default rust compiler shipped with Raspberry Pi OS is too old to compile Disktest. A newer Rust compiler must be used on Raspberry Pi.

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Michael Buesch <m@bues.ch>

Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, or (at your option) any later version.