HDD Burn In with Python

[hokieghal99]

Irmen de Jong wrote:

> Just letting your harddisk work hard for a long time doesn't
> require optimized C code. Python is perfectly suitable for that.

Yes, I agree! Now, if I only knew how to conduct a proper stress test. 
Read, write, verify reads & writes... would that be sufficient?

> 
> The only problem is, that for a true harddisk stress test, you
> will want to access sectors all over the disk. I'm not aware of
> any mechanism to do that with portable Python...
> (although you could format the disk in one huge partition and
> then write random files to it until the disk is full).
> 

That's an idea. But what approach might one take if there were already 
files and folders on the volume that should not be destroyed? Some type 
of non-destructive test?