Disk Benchmark Program?


Grench

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So - do we have one?


There is a nice one built into Ubuntu these days - not sure how portable it would be.


I'd like to be able to benchmark different classes and brands SD, SDHC and SDXC cards, USB HDD devices, network drives - then have a common thread to post the results in or some sort of online tabulation.


Anyone got an idea of something like this that is already built or can be easily ported?
 
wasnt there something similar to h2testw on pandora? the name is slipping my mind atm. does that provide read/write speeds like h2testw?
 
Here's the wiki page about SD cards, maybe it would help you: http://www.pandorawiki.org/SD_card


As for benchmarking, since I don't have SDs and HDDs all around my house, I think I could 'benchmark' them with plain fdisk (to count the blocks) and time cp somebigfile > /media/sdcard. Would this be valid? //Oh, yes, almost. )


I seriously doubt that Canonical wrote some revolutionary benchmarking tool, they would rather make a pyGTK frontend for something like what I've mentioned.


I can add my cards as soon as I get my lcd fixed, read speed for sure and write speed if I'll find some 'undestructive' way to test them.
 
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Here's the wiki page about SD cards, maybe it would help you: http://www.pandorawiki.org/SD_card


As for benchmarking, since I don't have SDs and HDDs all around my house, I think I could 'benchmark' them with plain fdisk (to count the blocks) and time cp somebigfile > /media/sdcard. Would this be valid? //Oh, yes, almost. )


I seriously doubt that Canonical wrote some revolutionary benchmarking tool, they would rather make a pyGTK frontend for something like what I've mentioned.


I can add my cards as soon as I get my lcd fixed, read speed for sure and write speed if I'll find some 'undestructive' way to test them.

That would not report seek, etc... Also, file size and speed are inter-related so simply copying one gigantic file to it and timing it doesn't really work so well. If you have an Ubuntu install or live disk, take a look at it's disk benchmarking tool. It's actually pretty good.
 
Hmm, neat thingie.


Installed gnome-disk-utility-git, it's not 'ubuntu only', but it's gtk3 and it requires quite a large part of Gnome, so just plain recompiling it wouldn't do. Does it have to be on Pandora? Or you just want as many SD cards benchmarked like this as possible?
 
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Hmm, neat thingie.


Installed gnome-disk-utility-git, it's not 'ubuntu only', but it's gtk3 and it requires quite a large part of Gnome, so just plain recompiling it wouldn't do. Does it have to be on Pandora? Or you just want as many SD cards benchmarked like this as possible?

It 100% needs to be on the Pandora. After all, the root question is: "What SD/SDHC/SDXC card works best with the OpenPandora console?"


So - benchmarking cards on a Quad Core 4Ghz machine with a USB 3.0 card reader isn't going to be relevant to the above question.
 
What is a good test set then?


I don't have an opportunity to do anything with my Pandora right now, but it has Perl preinstalled, and some file operation libraries are there by default, so I think I could hack together some simple 'benchmark', it wouldn't draw nice diagrams but it would show some numbers. Not sure if something that high level would be extremely precise, but it might show that this card is better than that.


Or maybe we could port bonnie++?
 
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time cp somebigfile > /media/sdcard. Would this be valid?

That would be nice to measure (perhaps /dev/urandom instead of a real file so that NAND read speed don't interfere with the results). But thats one side of the coin. Random access speeds are also important and I can't think of any simple solution to measure that.
 
For testing cards you kinda need to test, random 4k, random 16k, and sequential, something like 256 mb should do. Of course for both read an write.
 
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