kris.kalish.net

I was looking for a quick and dirty way to benchmark hard drives this morning and I stumbled upon iozone. It was way sweeter and more elaborate than I could have ever dreamed!

Here’s a quick and dirty jump-start guide for Ubuntu 9.04:
cd ~
sudo apt-get install gnuplot iozone3
cp -R /usr/share/doc/iozone3/examples ./iozone
cd iozone
uncompress gnu3d.dem
# The following command runs the benchmark and will take a while to complete
iozone -a > mybenchmark.txt
chmod u+x Generate_Graphs
./Generate_Graphs mybenchmark.txt


This will start gnuplot and display a graph that can be rotated. Closing it will open the next one in the sequence. The script also generates a bunch of postscript versions of the graphs.

To get a bunch of png images make a script called topng.sh.

File topng.sh:
#!/bin/bash
newFileName=`basename $1`
newFileName=`echo $newFileName | sed s/.ps/.png/`

echo $newFileName
ps2png $1 ./pngs/$newFileName


Then execute:
find -name "*.png" -exec ./topng.sh {} ;


Here are the resulting benchmarks:

Samsung 250GB Benchmark

Graphs generated by gnuplot and IOZone.

13 Photos

Seagate 7200.12 1TB Benchmark

13 Photos

If you’re looking for a little more thorough description of IOZone and what the benchmarks really mean, someone else has already written it.