Ok......

I just installed the 1st driver that allowed the new Macbook Pro to see the new FirmTek 5 bay and it's 5 1TB drives.

I would like to run some kind of program that would constantly read and write to those drives for the next few days to to make sure they are performing well.

Can anyone recommend what I can do to put these drives through the paces before I pack up and pull out to asia for the next couple of years.

Bump bump....... :)

open a terminal window and type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Your5PMdisk/filename_of_your_choice

Rindse, repeat :)

Thanks Paolo.
I wasn't really sure what that command was going to do or tell me so instead I'm running Techtool Pro..... Read/ Write tests, Surface scan.......
So far so good......

dd is part of every Unix installation, and Mac OS is Unix. It's one of the greatest tools available to all Unix users. /dev/zero is a pseudo-file that returns an infinite stream of zeroes. The command dd if=/dev/zero of=/filename creates a file (of is output file) that is generated (if = input file) from the zero stream. The file will grow until there is available space. This is an operation that I use whenever I buy a new disk. I put it under a simulation of actual writes for the whole surface. It helped me not only find the defects on disks but also faulty memory chips.

Right-o Paolo!

Well said.
So I can just type this exactly as you have written it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/Your5PMdisk/filename_of_your_choice

Is there anything to note? Will it give me some kind of report that I can understand?

I'm not Unix savvy but I can get my head around most things ;)

Well, the of= parameter has to be adjusted to the path of your disk and the name of the file of your choice. If you type

dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes

and the press tab you will see the list of volume names, which should be the same that you see in the Finder. Be careful because dd will not ask for confirmation if you point to an existing file, it will just overwrite it.

Ok Paolo........

The drives in the 5 bay are brand new...... so I'm not really worried about overwriting anything on them just yet.

I gotta run now but I'll give it a go in the next 24 hours.

Thanks again for your time on this and I'll post again very soon!

Here's a great suite of apps for exactly what you want and then some:

http://www.SpeedTools.com/