Hard Disk Benchmarking Program

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 00:06:04 +0100, "Marcus"
wrote:

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something similar
to HD tach would be fine.

the real world performance ratio you will get using SiSoft sandra disk
benchmark ... forget about Burst Rate transfer
I get with mine 19000 points on UDMA33 (7,2k Quantum F+AS 20G) ...

-- Regards, SPAJKY
- http://freeweb.siol.net/jerman55/HP/Spajky.htm
Celly-III OC-ed,"Tualatin on BX-Slot1-MoBo!"
E-mail AntiSpam: remove ##

Marcus wrote:

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus

Burst rate is not a very useful indicator of real world performance - it only
measures data transfer in and out of the cache and ignores media transfer, and
media transfer is what you care about in the long run.

Go to http://www.storagereview.com and see how they test hard drives.

Last time I looked they relied on "Iometer" (written by Intel) to measure
performance.

A "good score" in a benchmark is meaningless unless it reflects what you spend
most of your time doing with the machine (or it spend doing). For example I'm
heavily into video editing. So for me, what matters more than anything else is
throughput in sequential writes/reads.

So don't worry about a "16000 SiSandra score" because in the end nobody cares -
what does it mean - nothing, it's an artificial number. You care about seek
time, I/O operations per second with a given file size, and media transfer
rate.

What you want out of a drive is : a big cache (8 MB or more), especially if you
capture video streams; high throughput as that'll help with large multimedia
files (I move gigabytes around every day); seek times as low as possible
(because low seek times are like a low CAS latency in RAM performance); noise
(because nobody wants to listen to a hard drive grinding away).

Storage Review is a GREAT resource for evaluating hard drive performance.

--Keith

Thanks to all replies

Marcus


"Keith Clark" wrote in message
...


Marcus wrote:

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the
whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer
only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something
similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus

Burst rate is not a very useful indicator of real world performance - it
only
measures data transfer in and out of the cache and ignores media transfer,
and
media transfer is what you care about in the long run.

Go to http://www.storagereview.com and see how they test hard drives.

Last time I looked they relied on "Iometer" (written by Intel) to measure
performance.

A "good score" in a benchmark is meaningless unless it reflects what you
spend
most of your time doing with the machine (or it spend doing). For example
I'm
heavily into video editing. So for me, what matters more than anything
else is
throughput in sequential writes/reads.

So don't worry about a "16000 SiSandra score" because in the end nobody
cares -
what does it mean - nothing, it's an artificial number. You care about
seek
time, I/O operations per second with a given file size, and media transfer
rate.

What you want out of a drive is : a big cache (8 MB or more), especially
if you
capture video streams; high throughput as that'll help with large
multimedia
files (I move gigabytes around every day); seek times as low as possible
(because low seek times are like a low CAS latency in RAM performance);
noise
(because nobody wants to listen to a hard drive grinding away).

Storage Review is a GREAT resource for evaluating hard drive performance.

--Keith

Where is the *nix version or source code?


Martin wrote:

http://www.geocities.com/vgrinenko/DiskSpeed32/

Martin.

"Marcus" wrote in message
...
Thanks to all replies

Marcus


"Keith Clark" wrote in message
...


Marcus wrote:

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the
whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer
only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something
similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus

Burst rate is not a very useful indicator of real world performance - it
only
measures data transfer in and out of the cache and ignores media
transfer,
and
media transfer is what you care about in the long run.

Go to http://www.storagereview.com and see how they test hard drives.

Last time I looked they relied on "Iometer" (written by Intel) to
measure
performance.

A "good score" in a benchmark is meaningless unless it reflects what you
spend
most of your time doing with the machine (or it spend doing). For
example
I'm
heavily into video editing. So for me, what matters more than anything
else is
throughput in sequential writes/reads.

So don't worry about a "16000 SiSandra score" because in the end nobody
cares -
what does it mean - nothing, it's an artificial number. You care about
seek
time, I/O operations per second with a given file size, and media
transfer
rate.

What you want out of a drive is : a big cache (8 MB or more), especially
if you
capture video streams; high throughput as that'll help with large
multimedia
files (I move gigabytes around every day); seek times as low as possible
(because low seek times are like a low CAS latency in RAM performance);
noise
(because nobody wants to listen to a hard drive grinding away).

Storage Review is a GREAT resource for evaluating hard drive
performance.

--Keith

You don't need to measure the burst rate - it will be 100 MB per second -
that's what makes your drive a UMDA 100 drive. Since no present hard drive
can supply data from the disk surface as fast as 80 MB per second the burst
rate test is not very useful; the on-drive cache can supply a burst on a
UMDA 100 drive at 100 MB per second, but as soon as it is empty (after at
most 8 MBytes) the transfer rate falls to the sustained sequential transfer
rate. It can only be filled at the rate limited by the drive data recording
density and rotational speed.

Phil Weldon,

"Marcus" wrote in message
...
Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something
similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus