The disk servers were stress tested for ~4 days using "stress" from the end of last week until Monday morning (when we had to shut down for electrical work. These tests consisted of 500 readers and writers, each writing 1GB files, reading them back, then deleting them (so the machines had a load average of 500+).

None of the disk servers seemed to have significant problems. disk032 did produce some odd kernel messages about being unable to read the partition table of /dev/sdb, but seems to have suffered no ill effects from this.

After the next stage of tests, which uses dt to write and read across the whole "disk" surface, we will do a RAID integrity check as a final validation of the suitability of this disk solution.

So far, ARECA + 500GB Hitachi disks is looking good.