topic Re: disk drive speed in Disk

disk drive speed

James Odak — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:10:22 GMT

i had an HP guy in once who downloaded some tool that you could run against either a disk or a logical volume group
it would write data to and from the drive(s) and tell you the MB/Sec it took

this was one step in a process to see if we could stream LTO2 tape drives

Does anyone know what this tools was and more importantly where i can re-download it from?

Re: disk drive speed

G. Vrijhoeven — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:17:14 GMT

Hi,

Create /dev/zero.
(mknod -c ?????etc)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mountpoint/file bs=1024k count=512
timex dd if=/mountpoint/file of=/dev/null bs=1024 count=512
512MB/seconds time=speed per second.

HTH,

Gideon

Re: disk drive speed

Hein van den Heuvel — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 20:42:38 GMT

dd is a fine first level approximation but is prone to false measureaments. Stuff like track-read-ahead, minimal head movement may skew the results unrealistically so.

There is a bunch of more extensive tools.
Some that come to mind: iozone, bonnie(+), iobench

Google for all of those and/or check out:

http://www.acnc.com/benchmarks.html
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=71309

btw, Gideon's reply has a typo, leaving of a 'k' in db-1024k. Also, the large buffer size will measure throughput in MB/sec. For some applicaitons it is more important to know IO/sec and you want to repeat the same test with bs=1024 count=512000

hth,
Hein.

Re: disk drive speed

Stuart Abramson — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:55:42 GMT

sar -d will show disk transfer rates.

Set up the 24-hour data collection version.

Re: disk drive speed

Ted Buis — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:28:00 GMT

HP does have a tool, but it might be for internal use only. I would suggest you check with your HP presales TCC/SA/SE or ASE if you have Proactive support or higher.

Re: disk drive speed

Eric SAUBIGNAC — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 07:26:51 GMT

Hi James,

The tool your are searching for is probably "Pat" or "HPReadData". So have a look at this URL http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg50460 : there are links at the end of the page to download them and other tools.

I frequently use Pat with SAN Storage to mesure performances of different configurations. Never used HPReadData as it seems to have been designed for hpux 11.00

I you don't find it, let me know, il will send you the binary : 78 Ko zipped

Hope this will help

Eric

(PBFWME;-)

Re: disk drive speed

Jeff Christensen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:45:55 GMT

I didn't check into all the other responses but the utility you WANT is IOMETER. And you can d/l it free at www.OImeter.org.