Stress testing a hard drive with lots of random reads and writes

Question

I would like to stress test a hard drive with a long series of random reads and writes for a specified length of time, but I'm not sure how I can do it on macOS. I'm specifically interested in random reads and writes (as opposed to sequential reads and writes) as I want to make sure all of the physical components in the drive are stress tested.

One utility I've seen recommended for doing this is fio. However, I'm not sure what the correct way to use it is, particularly since most of the tutorials I've found assume you are running Linux.

How can I do this? I'm open answers for how to use fio or answers that recommend using another utility that can accomplish the same task.

Answer 1

This seems to do the trick:

sudo fio --name=randrw --time_based --runtime=86400 --ioengine=posixaio --iodepth=64 --rw=randrw --bs=64k --direct=1 --numjobs=8 --size=[size of disk] --filename=/dev/rdisk#

That should do a random read/write test for 24 The # can be obtained with diskutil list and [size of disk] is obtained with diskutil info /dev/disk#. I'm not sure if the --size argument is actually necessary but I included it anyway.