HDD Burn In with Python

[hokieghal99]

Anand Pillai wrote:

> 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 ;-)

Speed isn't a huge concern for this test. Heck, it will take many hours 
or possibly a day or two depending on the size of the drive. I like Perl 
as well, but it's too convoluted. I sometimes look back at one month old 
Perl scripts and wonder what the heck they do. To me, that's scary. I 
have a close friend who heads up a large NOC at a big US university and 
they have banned Perl for this very reason. I only use Perl when there 
is no other option, and I think Python is a valid choice for this task.

> 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.

This is a good tip. Thanks, I'll try it.