Disk (Stress)

This test simultaneously stresses hard, floppy, and CD-ROM disk drives by creating multiple threads for each drive you select. Each thread reads, writes, and verifies a 1-MB pattern for 30 minutes. This ensures that the drive correctly reads and writes data. A drive partition can use any file system format and can include CD-ROM drives. When testing Windows NT® systems, you must include at least one FAT and one NTFS hard drive partition, plus one floppy drive.

A thread that tests a CD-ROM drive reads from, but does not write to, that drive.

Parameters

Specify the disks and number of threads you want the test to use. By default, the test uses all drives with enough available space and creates 4 threads on floppy drive A or B and 20 threads on each hard drive partition.

Disk (Stress) Individual Drive

The test reads, writes, and verifies a 1-MB pattern for 30 minutes by creating multiple threads for the drive you select. This ensures that the drive correctly reads and writes data. A drive partition can use any file system format and can include CD-ROM drives. A thread that tests a CD-ROM drive reads from, but does not write to, that drive.

Parameters

Specify the disk and number of threads you want the test to use.

Disk - CD (Stress)

This test writes and verifies a 1-MB pattern for 30 minutes. This is done by creating multiple threads for the CD-ROM drive you select. This ensures that the drive correctly reads data.

Parameters

Specify the disk and number of threads you want the test to use.

SoftEnum (Stress)

This test checks that the operating system can withstand a PnP Stress Test on the test system. This tests Windows 2000's ability to dynamically enumerate, load drivers and start devices, as well as remove devices.

To do that, Test Manager will use a driver that exposes and removes dummy children, the same way a USB controller or a PCMCIA controller dynamically exposes or removes devices on their respective buses.

What is soft enumeration and what does it mean?
Soft Enumeration means to simulate the dynamic mechanism of enumeration (including plugging in hardware, finding drivers, ejecting hardware, etc.) through software. The software creates data structures for devices that don't exist, fooling the system into recognizing them as real devices.

What can be learned from the log file?

Parameters

None.

Issues

If you have run SoftEnum once and want to run it again you must reboot your test system, or else you will get a bugcheck. This is an OS issue that will be fixed in a later build of Windows 2000.

Performance Counter Check

This test verifies that the system performance counters do not step backwards.

System Stress

This test puts an abnormal load on the system by simultaneously stressing disk access, memory management, GDI operations, module management, and system caching.

Parameters

None.

Configuration

Verify that there is at least 50 MB of free space on the HCT partition.

Recommendations

Before running this test, verify that there are no directories named TMP*.* in the \HCT\Testbin directory. Plan to run this test to completion. Once you start it, you cannot stop it with the Abort button.

Issues

There are several reasons why system stress may fail:

1. Page file size is set too small. To reset page file size, see the Windows help topic entitled To change the size of the virtual memory paging file. For the best results, it is recommended that you set your system's page file size to twice the amount of physical memory (for 64 Megabytes of RAM, a 128 Megabyte page file is appropriate).
2. Disk space shortage prevents page file from growing to its maximum size. System stress can use cause the page file to grow to over 100 Megabytes of disk space. If there is not enough free space on the hard disk drive that contains the paging file, system stress will fail.