Stability Testing an Overclocked Raspberry Pi
In the final part of the series of posts concerning Overclocking and Stability Testing the Raspberry Pi, we will be checking SD Card Storage reliability with the elinux.org Stability Test Script.

Introducing the Overclocking Stability Test Script
The Stability Test Script is a program from elinux.org, described on that site as:
…a script to stress-test the stability of the system, specifically the SD card. If this script runs to completion, without any errors showing in
dmesg
, then the Raspberry Pi is probably stable with these settings
Why Stability Test the Pi’s SD Storage?
As noted in Part One of this series, in the early days (and years) of the Pi’s existence there were apparently widespread issues whereby overclocked machines experienced corrupted SD card data. The official, definitive, information on this issue comes from elinux.org: SD Card Usage with Overclocking
Stability of SD card operations when using overclocking is independent of:
- Filesystem type, ext4, NTFS or other.
- SD card vendor.
- The Raspberry Pi model.
- SD card size – verified for 16 GB and up.
What does matter is when you under-power your Raspberry Pi (that is, less than the Raspberry Pi base setup specifications!).
There initially was an increased likelihood of SD card corruption when using overclocking. This is no longer an issue (with firmware from Nov 11 2013 or later).