HDD Burn In with Python

[Anand Pillai]

I dont know of any application that currently does this.

I think for applications that perform a lot of I/O, Python
might not be a good choice. The file I/O in Python is written
in optimized C, but still you would be better off writing
a C program for this, that is portable. For example, if you
are targeting only Unix/Linux platforms there wont be much
difficulty writing a portable C app optimized, say for the
gcc compiler.

Since you have Windows also mentioned, I recommend Perl.
Perl is a bit faster than Python in system related tasks and
it is portable also. Python, though my favorite language comes
only second here. And of course, forget about Jython ;-)

If you do write your app in Python, perform benchmarks to
time the Python app itself. A good way to do this is by
using the 'Profile' class (of 'profile' module) by its 'calibrate'
method. This will make sure that the timings are done accurately.
This will be the major difference between a C app and a Python app,
since the C system calls are fast enough that their times can be
ignored.

It will be a tough job to get it portable and just right
on all platforms. So let me know if you do come up with an app
like that in Python. 

-Anand

hokiegal99 at hotmail.com (hokiegal99) wrote in message news:<93f5c5e9.0312291536.7ba81c3b at posting.google.com>...
> Hi Again,
> 
> I have Macs, Windows and Linux PCs. I'd like to have a generic HDD
> burn in program to test new drives on all platforms. I know Python is
> portable enough to handle the platform differences, but would it be a
> good language for this type of application? The process would involve
> lots of reads and writes all over the drives for an extended period of
> time (several hours). Anybody else done something similar to this? Any
> suggestions?
> 
> Thanks !!!