Disk |

These fields and buttons allow the user to select the drives used in the disk test. This includes tests for hard disks, solid-state drives, flash drives, floppy disk drives and other types of drives Disk selection Automatically select all fixed drives at the start of testing If you would like to test all fixed disks (non removable hard disks and SSDs) over multiple systems that have different drives letters, you can select “Automatically select all fixed drives at the start of testing” and all of the fixed disk volumes on the system will be selected prior to running the test. When this option is selected, the test settings for all disks can be modified by selecting the "# Auto settings" row in the Disk selection list. It is not possible to configure individual disk settings when this option is selected. This option will not alter the preferences for floppy disk drives or optical drives. To also include removable drive volumes, specify the command line parameter "-ADR". Edit details for drive To edit the test preferences for a disk, select the Drive in the “Disk Selection” list. Any changes you make in the “Edit details for drive: <drive name>” will be reflected in this list. A drive name is shown by either it's disk volumes letter (e.g. "C:") or a physical drive number (e.g. "2:"). Test this drive To specify that a drive should be tested, check the “Test this drive”. This will copy the last used settings to the drive specified. To test a shared network drive, the drives needs to have a drive letter mapped to it. Only those drives detected by the Windows operating system as displayed in the drop down list. The following settings can be configured differently for each drive: Slow drive warning threshold, File size, Test Pattern and Log SMART errors. To use the general disk drive Duty cycle for each disk just set the Duty Cycle override value to blank (no value), otherwise set the required value per disk. To remove a disk from the test, uncheck the “Test this drive”. Up to 50 disk volumes (drive letters) and physical drives (drive numbers) can be selected for simultaneous testing. Note: The simultaneous testing of two partitions on the same physical hard drive will result in a lot of seeking between partitions and slow down the test significantly. Physical drives (drive numbers) will be shown in BurnInTest Professional. The physical disk read test will be selectable on each of these disks. The other test modes will only be selectable if the disk is either unformatted or formatted but has no Windows installation and no paging file. This raw disk test will create virtual test files on the raw disk. Administrator privileges are required, under Vista (and later), elevated Administrator privileges are required.CAUTION: As the Raw disk test will write directly to the disk (not via the file system), all data on the disk including any disk format information (e.g. NTFS information) will be destroyed. As such, use this option with caution. The only exception is the physical disk read test which ONLY reads data and hence will not destroy data on the disk. Test mode The test patterns that can be selected are explained in the section, “Disk test suite". File size The use can select the test file size and test pattern that is used with the disk test for each disk. The size of the file is equal to a certain percentage of the disks capacity. The default file size is 1.0% of the disk size. So if a disk had a total capacity of 200GB then the default size of each file would be 2GB. Setting a smaller percentage results in more files being created on the disk and the read / verify cycle occurring more quickly. Note that one disk test cycle is defined to be writing a test file of the size specified by this setting, and reading/verifying the data. Note that the file system type (NTFS, FAT32 or FAT) and the version of the Windows operating system (e.g. Windows XP) may limit the size of the file that can be created on a disk. Seek count For test modes that perform seeking to different positions on the disk drive (e.g. Random data with random seeking), the seek count specifies the number of seeks for a particular iteration (e.g. After Random data with random seeking has created 100 test files, the Seek count specifies the number of times a seek should occur between blocks within these 100 files). Block size Test files are written and read to the files system/ disk in multiple blocks. This is the read/ write block size. Generally, the larger the block size the faster the test will be. Block sizes range from 4KB to 64MB. The default block size is 4MB. 256KB is the suggested block size for Floppy disk drives. Pattern A user defined test pattern, specified in 8-byte hexadecimal (e.g. 00AA00AA00AA00AA). Slow drive threshold BurnInTest can be configured so that a warning message is generated when the transfer speed from a disk device drops below a certain level. The transfer speed is measured in Megabytes / second and a different threshold can be assigned for each drive. The transfer speed is measured during the writing or reading of a test data block. It is measured over a duration of at least 1 second, with a minimum of 2 data blocks transferred. The most recent measurement is displayed as Current Speed on the Disk test Window. Selecting a level of 0 will disable the feature. When the measured I/O transfer speed is below the threshold, a warning message will appear in the detailed error log. The entry will be similar to the following, 2002-08-30 15:01:26, Disk, Threshold level: 20.00 MB/Sec, Measured speed: 18.29 MB/Sec The duty cycle for the disk test should be set to 100% when using this feature. Using a lower value doesn’t make a lot of sense. Setting a threshold can be useful in helping to determine if the drive is functioning correctly and the correct device drivers have been loaded. Duty cycle override To use the general disk drive Duty cycle for each disk just set the Duty Cycle override value to blank (no value), otherwise set the required value per disk. SMART options Run self test and log SMART errors Select this checkbox to have BurnInTest run the Disk Self Test and monitor the disk drives SMART attributes. The Disk Self Test is a set of built-in routines implemented by the vendor to perform failure diagnostics on the disk. If a SMART attribute for any of the hard drives being tested exceeds its threshold, an error is logged along with the attribute exceeded. To learn more about SMART see What is S.M.A.R.T? Log bad sector increase Select this checkbox to have BurnInTest monitor changes to the disk drive bad sector SMART attribute during the test. Bad sector threshold When "Log bad sector increase" is selected, this value specifies the threshold after which BurnInTest will raise an error. It is the allowed increased in the number of bad sectors during the test.