Interrupting DMM tests from an external program

An exciting new feature included in the STB Suite Disk Manufacturing Module (DMM) is the ability to interrupt a test sequence from an external source, asynchronously.

Why would you want to do this? Let’s take an example situation where you are testing a new disk drive design. Part of your test process involves monitoring the power drawn by the device at various times during testing. At various stages of your DMM test you use the DMM Run External Program feature to change the temperature in an environmental chamber.

Let’s say that at a certain temperature extreme something goes wrong with the drive and it begins to draw excessive current. Your power supply setup lets you sense this power issue, and now you can use the DMM Asynchronous Message feature to tell DMM to stop all tests on that particular drive – immediately. DMM will receive this message, and can take several actions depending on what your outside program tells it to do.

It could do like the example above and immediately stop all tests on the specified drive. Or it could simply log a text message that your outside program sends. Or it can signal DMM to stop the current test and execute a new, user-specified external executable program.

Let’s look at another example – as above you are testing a new disk drive. At any point in time another external program could send a message to DMM to insert a text message into the specified drive log file. Your power supply could log voltage and current measurements for each individual drive every 15 minutes. Or your hardware protocol analyzer could log metric information for a specific drive. Or, if a performance metric was out of tolerance a failure message could be logged and the tests stopped on the drive.

Any test can be interrupted at any time – to log data, to stop testing, or to run an external executable program – on an individual drive-by-drive basis.

That’s what we call unlimited versatility in a test environment!

For more information contact us at (720) 249-2641