Testing Spare Drives in Software RAID

I know mdadm offers a "--test" command, but it seems quite useless:

-t, --test

              Generate a TestMessage alert for every array found at startup. This alert gets mailed and passed to the alert program. This can be used for testing that alert message to get through successfully.

That helps with knowing that alerts are working, but I'd like to be able to test the spare drive in an array. Is there any way to test a spare device in a RAID to make sure it's in good shape and not likely to fail once it's needed?

Thanks!

Hal

--

To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org Received on Wed Aug 22 23:05:53 2007