NAME

diskroaster - multithreaded disk testing utility that writes and verifies data on a raw disk device

SYNOPSIS

diskroaster [OPTIONS] DISK

DESCRIPTION

diskroaster is a multithreaded disk testing utility designed to stress-test hard drives and SSDs. It divides the disk into sections and writes data in parallel using multiple worker threads, then verifies the written data block-by-block.

It is useful for burn-in testing, quality control, or diagnosing disk reliability.

OPTIONS

-h

Print help and exit.

-w <workers>

Number of parallel worker threads. Default: 4.

-n <passes>

Number of write+verify passes to perform. Default: 1.

-b <blocksize>

Block size for write operations. Default: 4096 bytes. Supports k or m suffixes (e.g., 64k, 1m, 32m).

-z

Write zero-filled blocks instead of random data.

EXAMPLES

Run 8 parallel workers, writing 32MB zero-filled blocks to /dev/ada1 and verifying them:

diskroaster -w 8 -b 32m -z /dev/ada1

OUTPUT AND VERIFICATION

Each worker operates on a separate section of the disk. After writing, it reads back the data and verifies it block by block. Any mismatches or read errors will be reported.

WARNINGS

• This tool overwrites all data on the specified disk.
• Be absolutely sure the target (e.g., /dev/ada1) is not your system disk or a mounted volume.
• diskroaster allocates one memory buffer per worker thread. Total memory usage is approximately:

Using many threads with a large block size can cause high memory consumption and may lead to out-of-memory (OOM) errors.

•

Root privileges are required to access raw block devices.

BUILDING

To build and install:

make && make install

Tested on Linux and FreeBSD using standard POSIX make.

AUTHOR

Pavel Golubinskiy

SEE ALSO

dd(1), smartctl(8)