Question

I want to stress test the flash memory in an embedded Ubuntu system. For example, create files and store in the flash memory until there is no room. Is there a straight forward way of accomplishing this? I’m thinking that bash or a python script would be instrumental in testing this? Thanks for any assistance.

Answer 1

My favorite way of doing this is redirecting the output from the yes command to a file.

 $ yes > /path/to/my/device/yes.txt

You can limit it by using head:

 $ yes | head -n1000000 > /path/to/my/device/yes.txt

A bit more of an explanation. yes will continuously output the letter “y” followed by a newline… forever. When you redirect this output to a file, it will continue to add to that file until space runs out on the disk (or in some file systems, the max file size is reached).