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disk drive speed

 
James Odak
Valued Contributor

disk drive speed

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?
6 REPLIES 6
G. Vrijhoeven
Honored Contributor

Re: disk drive speed

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
Hein van den Heuvel
Honored Contributor

Re: disk drive speed



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.
Stuart Abramson
Trusted Contributor

Re: disk drive speed

sar -d will show disk transfer rates.

Set up the 24-hour data collection version.
Ted Buis
Honored Contributor

Re: disk drive speed

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.
Mom 6
Eric SAUBIGNAC
Honored Contributor

Re: disk drive speed

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;-)
Jeff Christensen
Occasional Contributor

Re: disk drive speed

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.