[GRLUG] Disk benchmarking (WAS: Solid State Drives)

[Michael Mol]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Collin Kidder <adderd at kkmfg.com> wrote:
> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> I don't believe that even desktop harddrives can sustain better than
> 30-40MB/s. Now, servers can be reading off of multiple drives with
> multiple platters and can reach much higher throughput.

I happened to run some tests tonight while rebuilding my desktop
computer. (Assembling a new box out of new and old components, adding
a new drive and moving data from the old drives around)

The command I ran tested sequential read performance for the first
gigabyte of the disk:
dd if=(device) of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024

My old 40GB IDE IBM Deskstar clocked in at 47 MB/s average, while my
somewhat newer 7200RPM SATA2 500GB Seagate Barracuda clocked in at
67MB/s.  I didn't test my new 1TB SAMSUNG drive, as it was in the
middle of an offline SMART test, and I wasn't sure how much the self
test would impact the benchmark.

I don't have a good way of testing seek times, though.  Does anyone
know of a good, free hard drive benchmark tool I can run from an
Ubuntu live CD?  I'm not going to build a Bart PE disk for the
purpose, nor can I put the drives in a Windows box.

-- 
:wq