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General Hardware General hardware related questions. |
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I'm also interested in this question, and am sure I don't do enough. So, I can only offer some simple things.
For RAM I use memtest. For hard disks I use badblocks and monitor the SMART info using smartmontools. When populating a new hard disk (or partitions) with existing data, I use GNU tar, cksum and/or diff to compare old and new. |
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Running memtest86+ is a good start. Not all errors show up immediately, so let it run for a day or so.
Disks are also a common point of failure. I don't know what a good tool for that is these days, but back when I did repairs for a computer shop I ran a tool which reads the entire drive. If there are significant dips in read speed then it's time to replace. SMART isn't all that reliable. That was with "old" spindle disks though! I don't know what the best way to test SSDs is, but I guess the same method will work for them as well(?) Other hardware is more tricky. I remember things like video cards only failing after 15 minutes of full usage, or network cards failing only after intensive usage (but not during casual browsing). I wrote a bunch of tools to stress test various things, but I don't have the code any more. You can probably find some stuff online. In the end it's pretty much impossible to be 100% sure.
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