AC&NC | RAID.edu - Disk I/O Benchmarks

		Nbench A very nice little benchmarking program for Windows NT. Nbench reports the following components of performance: CPU speed: integer and floating operations/sec L1 and L2 cache speeds: MB/sec main memory speed: MB/sec disk read and write speeds: MB/sec SMP systems and multi-tasking OS efficiency can be tested using up to 20 separate threads of execution. NTiogen 1.03 - UPDATED NTiogen benchmark was written by Symbios Logic. It's Windows NT port of their popular UNIX benchmark IOGEN. NTIOGEN is the parent processes that spawns the specified number of IOGEN processes that actually do the I/O. The program will display as output the number of processes, the average response time, the number of I/O operations per second, and the number of KBytes per second. IOmeter - UPDATED This benchmark was originally written by Intel. Intel has discontinued the development and released the source code into public domain. SOURCEFORGE.NET is currently hosting this project. IOMETER is a disk I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer's I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. It is now available for Windows 2000, Linux, and Solaris. Bench32 A very comprehensive benchmark that measures overall system performance under Windows NT or Windows 95. Unfortunately, the company that wrote this benchmarking program seems to have gone out of business. You can find a local copy of Bench32 v.1.21 here. ThreadMark A very popular benchmark written by Adaptec. Adaptec's decided that they cannot support it anymore and thus they have removed this benchmark from their web site. Click on the link to download ThreadMark from our server. HDTach v.2.61 Shareware/commercial disk I/O benchmark. HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. In Windows 95/98 it uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum accuracy by bypassing the file system. A similar mechanism is used in Windows NT. HD Tach reads from areas all over the hard drive and reports its average speed. It also logs the read speeds to a text file that you can load into a spreadsheet and graph to visually read the results of the test.

		Michael's Disk Benchmark v.1.11 A simple disk I/O benchmark to use under Windows 95. It also runs under NT 4.0 This is a shareware program, $10 registration fee is required after 30 days of use.

		UNIX Windows DOS

		Please note that we have only collected benchmarks for measuring I/O performance. There are tools available for benchmarking various other system components. Very often, it is very hard to get objective I/O performance results from your storage vendor. They use proprietary benchmarks or their benchmarks get tuned to their particular storage device. This makes it very hard to compare different products from different vendors. To overcome this, you can download one of the benchmarks for "open systems" we have here and then run it with different vendors' storage devices. This will give you results which can be compared against each other, thus giving you an opportunity to buy a storage solution that is right for YOUR company. A word of caution. You can get great I/O performance results as indicated by one of the benchmarks but in a REAL APPLICATION environment at your company, the performance can be not at all up to par. If at all possible, always try to test a storage device offered to you in YOUR APPLICATION environment. DON’T just rely on benchmark results! We hope you will find these benchmark programs helpful. Please check this page often because we will add more I/O benchmarking programs as we find them. If you would like to send us the results of running any of the above benchmarks on your hardware, please feel free to do so. We will post the results here when we get an adequate number of responses.