How do I test IDE controller failure?

[LeetestUnleet]

I've got a reason to believe that my IDE controller is causing hard drives to fail (also discussed in another thread but for some reason it's not allowing me to reply to it). How can I check to see if this is the case?

 

[LeetestUnleet]

I've connected an old hard drive to the port (300meg out of an old 486) and wrote a small batch file (named run.bat) to produce heavy disk activity:

dir /s
chkdsk
md tempdel
cd tempdel
cd..
rd tempdel
scandisk /all /nosummary /auto
run.bat

It runs on continous loop, so if my theory is correct, this old hard drive should fail on me like the others, correct? Any other ways to test?