> hm, if it was me, I'd write a small C program that just jumped
> directly on the device around and did random writes assuming it wasn't
> formatted. For sequential read, just flush caches and dd the device
> to /dev/null. Probably someone will suggest better tools though.
I have a program I wrote years ago for a purpose like this. One of the
things it can
do is write to the filesystem at the same time as dirtying pages in a
large shared
or non-shared memory region. The idea was to emulate the behavior of a
database
reasonably accurately. Something like bonnie++ would probably be a good
starting
point these days though.