IOzone is a filesystem benchmark tool. The benchmark generates and measures a variety of file operations. Iozone has been ported to many machines and runs under many operating systems.

Iozone is useful for performing a broad filesystem analysis of a vendor’s computer platform. The benchmark tests file I/O performance for the following operations: Read, write, re-read, re-write, read backwards, read strided, fread, fwrite, random read, pread ,mmap, aio_read, aio_write

Benchmark Features:

• ANSII C source
• POSIX async I/O
• Mmap() file I/O
• Normal file I/O
• Single stream measurement
• Multiple stream measurement
• Distributed fileserver measurements (Cluster)
• POSIX pthreads
• Multi-process measurement
• Excel importable output for graph generation
• Latency plots
• 64bit compatible source
• Large file compatible
• Stonewalling in throughput tests to eliminate straggler effects
• Processor cache size configurable
• Selectable measurements with fsync, O_SYNC
• Builds for: AIX, BSDI, HP-UX, IRIX, FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OSFV3, OSFV4, OSFV5, SCO OpenServer, Solaris, MAC OS X, Windows (95/98/Me/NT/2K/XP)

[ http://www.iozone.org/ ]

For a comprehensive test use iozone -a (takes a lot of time, depending on your filesystem size)

For a short fast benchmark you can use: iozone -a -s 10000 -O This will limit the record size to 10000 and does the output in operations per second (higher numbers mean faster drive).