new iMac - stress test recommendation?

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Level 1

35 points

new iMac - stress test recommendation?

Later this week I will be picking up a new 20" iMac.

Is there some recommended "stress test" program I can run for a few days to see if any smoke will appear before I start moving critical data to it and using the system for real work?

I see reference to something called AHT (Apple Hardware Test?), but I don't have the system yet, and I'm not sure if that will be included with the new system and do what I want.

TIA

20" iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 15, 2008 12:53 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Malcolm Rayfield

Level 7

28,123 points

Jan 15, 2008 1:32 PM in response to LordSmoke

Apple Hardware Test comes with all new Macs. If you start the Extended Test, then press Control-L it should go into loop mode, so you can run it overnight.

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Answer 2

Jan 15, 2008 2:48 PM in response to LordSmoke

What do you mean by smoke?

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Answer 3

LordSmoke Author

Level 1

35 points

Jan 15, 2008 3:00 PM in response to Kayle Michael

By "smoke" I mean any hardware failure: disk, display, memory, CPU, ...

Software failures would be interesting, too, if they related to the OS.

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Answer 4

Jan 15, 2008 3:22 PM in response to LordSmoke

Okay Thanks.....I was wondering if people were having their iMac's litterly smoke. That would be a little odd. I mean it happens once in a while but not always.

On a side note: Does the iMac have the new penron processor in it? Or has anyone heard if it will anytime soon?

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Answer 5

mrtotes

Level 6

11,836 points

Jan 15, 2008 3:50 PM in response to Kayle Michael

Apple never announces details of such updates until they are posted on the front page of Apple.com. It's not a Penryn 45nm in the iMac. It's the laptop version of the 65nm Core 2 Duo: Merom or Merom XE.

mrtotes

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Answer 6

LordSmoke Author

Level 1

35 points

Jan 18, 2008 9:34 AM in response to LordSmoke

I picked up the iMac yesterday, and ran AHT as suggested overnight looping in extended mode - 15 runs, 8 hours, no errors. Thanks.

Now, for some follow up questions.

1) Where can I find a list of what AHT actually does? The documentation and everything I have found online is rather ambiguous

2) Specifically, everything I found suggests AHT does not test the internal hard drive. Yet, near the end of a test pass, the message "Testing Storage" was displayed. Is that not the harddisk?

3) I really liked a program I discovered called Xbench. That seems to exercise everything, including the harddrive, in an obvious way. Does anyone know of a way I can get it to loop overnight or repeat indefinitely?

TIA, MacNoob

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Answer 7

Jan 18, 2008 11:27 AM in response to LordSmoke

I think there might be a way you can view the test results in AHT which will tell you what tests are preformed but I'm not positive. The extended test is an extended RAM test. The testing storage part probably either just test the drive interface or may not have anything to do with the hard drive at all. A better test for that would be TechTool Pro and if you have Apple Care inside the Apple Care box is a TechTool Pro install disk. Run TechTool and under the options select Surface Scan.

George

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Answer 8

Jan 18, 2008 1:33 PM in response to LordSmoke

2) Specifically, everything I found suggests AHT does not test the internal hard drive. Yet, near the end of a test pass, the message "Testing Storage" was displayed. Is that not the harddisk?

It tests the functionality of the drive but does not test the entire media. That would take many hours. For that you need other software, such as Media Scanner from
<http://www.speedtools2.com/STUS.html>

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Answer 9

LordSmoke Author

Level 1

35 points

Feb 4, 2008 1:42 PM in response to LordSmoke

Just an update.

I ran the AHT overnight for several days, then to stress the harddrive I ran repeated benchmarks with the unix utility bonnie++ ( http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/) overnight for a few more.

That satisfied me enough to proceed with moving data, and I have since had the system screaming for days creating, testing, and burning and retesting .zip archives (DVD+R DL) of nearly 10 years of data.

All seems well.

Thanks to all who answered.

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