could fio be used to wipe disks?

From: Antoine Beaupre <anarcat@orangeseeds.org>
To: fio@vger.kernel.org
Subject: could fio be used to wipe disks?
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 17:42:55 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87fuie2p40.fsf@curie.anarc.at> (raw)

Hi,

I'm writing a stress-testing tool and i'm looking at using fio to
stress-test disks. The point is not exactly to benchmark the disks, but
put sustained load on the disks to make sure they are generally in
working order.

Right now, I came up with something like this:

      fio --name=stressant --readwrite=randrw  --filename=/dev/sdX \
          --size=100% --numjob=4 --sync=1 --direct=1 --group_reporting

My question is:

 1. will this reliably wipe the whole drive? i know that some data can
    remain due to magnetic properties of the drive or nasty SSD tricks,
    but assume we don't do crazy forensics

 2. if not, is there a way to directly test write I/O directly through
    the device (to ignore filesystem-related issues) non-destructively?

Thanks!

A.

PS: for those curious, my prototype is available here:

https://gitlab.com/anarcat/stressant/blob/master/stressant.py

Nothing serious so far...

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