Because of the rigorous system demands made by a production database server, Microsoft SQL Server will sometimes encounter problems in the underlying operating system or hardware which might appear as instabilities or errors. These problems could occur even though hardware diagnostics have run without reporting them, and other server applications on the system have generated no errors.
Sqlhdtst helps isolate these cases by performing a high-intensity, multithreaded file system stress test. It also exercises the Win32 overlapped, or asynchronous, I/O APIs. Sqlhdtst indicates a problem with an on-screen error. Because Sqlhdtst does not use any SQL Server components, any problem detected indicates a problem in the platform and not in SQL Server. These problems can exist at the hardware, controller, firmware, device driver, or operating-system layers.