LinuxPlanet: Hardware Notes: Hard Drive Benchmarking With iozone

“Try this experiment some time on an unsuspecting geek
friend:”

“Ask your unwitting subject about the performance of his or her
newest computer, and I bet you’ll be treated to a litany of specs:
how many megahertz or gigahertz the processor and graphics chip
are, how much memory is on the motherboard and the graphics board,
what kind and size of cache the CPU uses, etc. But nowhere in this
recital will your friend tell you anything specific about the hard
drives in the system–no data transfer rates, no platter RPM
values, no drive cache sizes, etc. For many computer users, even
the hardest of the hard core, disk drives are “just there,” and any
detail beyond the drive being EIDE or SCSI, or (possibly) UDMA 66
or UDMA 100 or some particular sub-flavor of SCSI, is a
mystery.”

“This is a shame, and all the more curious, since modern desktop
computers, particularly those in a mainstream setting, are
typically more sensitive to the speed of their disk subsystem than
they are to their processor speed. Except for the people who spend
all day generating fractals or applying graphics filters to huge
image files, very few of us are up against a processor speed limit.
Yet several times every day most of us have to wait for a disk
drive. If nothing else, notice how much time it takes your system
to boot or compile a kernel, and how much disk I/O it does during
that process, and ask yourself how much of the delay is due to the
processor and how much of it is the system waiting for disk I/O to
complete.”

Complete
Story