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

[Steve Romanow]

Michael Mol wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
What does hdparm -tT return you?