Command to force hard drive arm to move to a specific position on the platter What *nix command would cause the hard drive arm to rapidly switch between the centre and the edge of the platter? In theory it should soon cause a mechanical failure. It is for an experiment with old hard drives.

`hdparm --read-sector N` will issue a low-level read of sector _N_ bypassing the block layer abstraction. Use `-I` to get the device's number of sectors.