On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 1:15 AM, Dale<rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> <SNIP> >> >>>>> >>>>> Other than copying a file and using time to measure how long it takes, >>>>> what is the best test of a hard drive's speed? >>>>> >>>> >>>> By running a benchmark tool that does exactly this. IOzone is a nice >>>> one: >>>> >>>> http://www.iozone.org >>>> >>>> It's in portage: "app-benchmarks/iozone". >>>> >>> >>> I installed it but trying to figure out how to use it. Jeez, what a man >>> page. O_O >>> >>> >> >> Yeah, it's a tough one. Also, very slow, assuming I understand it >> correctly. You have to use file sizes larger than the memory of the >> system, so on a 24GB system it takes (literally) a day or two to run. >> (Assuming I actually understood the man page!) ;-) >> >> - Mark >> >> >> > > I found this command and it worked pretty well. It does take a good while > to run tho. It wasn't to bad on my new rig but the old rig did take a > little while. > > iozone -R -l 5 -u 5 -r 4k -s 100m -F /home/f1 /home/f2 /home/f3 /home/f4 > /home/f5 | tee -a /tmp/iozone_results.txt & > > The results were much different than what hdparm shows. It shows the > 3Gbs/sec like they advertise they can do. I wonder which is more accurate? > :/ > > Dale
Hi Dale, Good command, but it's missing one parameter that will likely make your results more meaningful. Try it again with the -e parameter added. I'll limit the tests also to just the initial write and read tests to give you something else to thiink about: iozone -R -l 5 -u 5 -r 4k -s 100m -i 0 -i 1 -e -F /home/f1 /home/f2 /home/f3 /home/f4 /home/f5 | tee -a /tmp/iozone_results.txt & I'll be more than happy to explain later why I suggested the changes, but in the spirit of someone's earlier comments about people doing research, give some thought to the results you get and see if you can explain to yourself why -e makes a difference. Do you believe the results you get are meaningful? If you want another good experiment, remove -e and make the files much larger, like 2g if you have an 8GB or DRAM. Again, explain to yourself why this makes a difference. If you do this experiment you _really_ should just do the -i 0 test only your first time through... ;-) (HINT: You might want to open another terminal, run top and when in top hit iz and maybe m if you're not showing memory usage...) Cheers, Mark
