Patent ID: 7877538

Claim:
A method for testing performance of a disk drive in a digital home communications terminal, the method comprising: measuring at least one time for data transfer of a group of sectors on the disk drive, wherein measuring the at least one time for the data transfer comprises: reading from the group of sectors to a first buffer, seeking to the group of sectors, staring a timer, writing to the group of sectors from the first buffer, enabling a write cache on the disk drive before writing to the group of sectors from the first buffer, flushing the write cache when writing to the group sectors from the first buffer is completed, and stopping the timer when flushing the write cache is completed; providing the at least one time to a server over a communications channel: providing a first error code to the server if writing to the group of sectors from the first buffer encounters a first drive error; and providing a second error code to the server if reading from the group of sectors to the first buffer encounters a second drive error.