The fastest storage validator for Linux (Open-Source)

Hey everyone,

I recently bought a barely used 4TB M.2 SSD at a steep discount. Of course, the first thing you want to do with a cheap, used drive is verify that it actually has the stated capacity so you don't get burned by fake firmware.


When looking for validation tools on Linux, the typical options are running fio scripts, badblocks, or piping dd streams. But these present a few problems. badblocks is ancient and severely bottlenecks modern PCIe 4.0/5.0 NVMe drives, fio is unintuitive and primarily a benchmarking tool. You can configure it to do almost the same as EVFY (fio uses a PRNG, not CSPRNG) but this results in a CPU bottleneck since fio's PRNG engine is too slow.

I decided to create a modern, open-source replacement in Rust called Entropy Verify (EVFY). I gave my best to put together all the technical pieces that would make for a great storage validation software.
EVFY features:

Direct I/O: Bypasses OS RAM caching to force raw reads and writes.

Multi-threaded Worker Architecture: Pins worker threads to CPU cores and pipelines async I/O to max out NVMe speeds.

Cryptographic Checks: Generates uncompressible data via AES-NI streams and verifies integrity using the BLAKE3 hashing engine.

TUI Interface: Displays real-time thread workloads, throughput, and block metrics using the Ratatui crate. Pressing [Tab\] switches between decimal and binary units.

Safety Guardrails: Hardcoded blocks to stop you from accidentally executing a test on operating system root partitions (C:\\ or /). Cross-Platform compatibility: Supports Windows and Linux (utilizing io_uring on modern kernels, fallback for older kernels is included and works out of the box).

Verification Reports: Generates a markdown report on the target volume with performance metrics and block corruption logs.

The code is open-source, uses the AGPL-3.0 license and is ready for auditing/contributions. If you have a sketchy or new high-capacity drive you need to stress test or validate at maximum transfer speeds feel free to take a look at the project.

GitHub: https://github.com/blamie/EntropyVerify

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