Patent ID: 7254525

Claim:
A method for performing in-situ performance testing of a disk drive, the method comprising the steps of: emulating data transfer operations between the disk drive and an associated computer system via a command simulation routine; generating an in-situ set of read/write commands representative of a typical workload within the disk drive via a command generation routine to test command execution firmware of the disk drive; measuring disk drive performance results during concurrent execution of the command simulation routine and the command generation routine; determining if the disk drive performance results meet performance parameters; if the disk drive performance results do not meet the performance parameters, automatically identifying a set of new servo parameter values to apply to the disk drive in each subsequent iteration of in-situ tests of the disk drive; setting servo parameters of the disk drive to the new servo parameter values; iteratively performing additional in-situ tests of the disk drive using the command simulation routine for each set of the new servo parameter values; logging the disk drive performance results if the disk drive performance results fall within a performance range defined by the performance parameters; and marking the disk drive as a failed drive if the disk drive performance results fail to fall within a predetermined mean performance interval.