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

[Christopher Wieringa]

>>> >> 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.
>>
>> hdparm numbers are interesting, but don't tell you much about how
>> something is going to perform in real-life.
>
>I don't mind running better benchmarks, but I'll need some tool
>recommendations in the next few hours, before I install the final OS.

bonnie++ is very nice for testing performance of disks (and different file systems for that matter).  Make sure you set it to make files greater than 2 times the amount of RAM in your system so you don't run into any kernel caching of files in RAM.  I'm not sure what live CDs it is on, but it's relatively easy to get and install/compile (it is in the main Ubuntu channel for 8.10).

Chris