IO Hammer is a Linux utility designed to benchmark I/O hardware like: External hard drives DVD/CD Drives Not limited to block devices, it can work with files too.

And so on by reading one random byte of the entire file/block device.

You can configure how many seconds before requesting another read. This is useful for keep alive operations, Benchmarking hardware until failure to verify it's quality, or simply reducing stutter times when a disc has to spin up after not being used for a while.

This is a project branched from KeepSpin, as i saw it had more potential than just being a keep alive operation.

To compile iohammer, simply do your regular: gcc iohammer.version.c -o iohammer

If you don't have gcc, or don't want to compile, download the most recent binary of iohammer in the /bin folder

So for example, if you want to run a program in the background even if your virtual terminal closes. (Similar to a daemon)

nohup ./iohammer /dev/sr0 15.0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &