A solid-state drive (SSD) is composed of the storage media, the controller and other peripheral components. The storage media used in SSDs is NAND flash memory. During the manufacturing of SSDs, a self-testing procedure for testing the drive is performed before shipping. The purpose of a manufacturer self-test (MST) includes, but is not limited to, (1) testing whether the drive meets product requirements (if the drive does not meet certain criteria, it is not qualified or shipped), (2) pre-conditioning the flash memory media, and (3) initializing parameters that are needed for the SSD to be able to start normal operations when it arrives at the customer without additional efforts. An MST should also consider practical factors such as test time. Faster testing of a drive is normally considered better than slower testing. A MST is often run automatically on a large number of drives during mass production. Therefore, the test time among different drives should be reasonably consistent.