Can anyone recommend disk I/O benchmarking software for Windows?

Question

I want to test the performance of a filesystem under different conditions.

Specifically I want to test the performance of Windows virtual machines without compression and with compression both on "normal harddisk" and on USB-disk as it would be interesting to see exactly what the difference is.

What I need is a program that can test different aspects of filesystem (random access, sequential read/write, etc) and make pretty graphs that go well with my blog. Preferrably the application should be automated so I can add it to startup, this way the timing is the same for each run and I can repeat the runs for verification.

I can post a link to the results here when I get around to testing it. Right now its just in the planning phase.

Answer 1

Iometer is the I/O measurement tool. And it's free. From the website:

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 - since then it got wide spread within the industry.

Meanwhile Intel has discontinued to work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). In November 2001, a project was registered at SourceForge.net and an initial drop was provided. Since the relaunch in February 2003, the project is driven by an international group of individuals who are continuesly improving, porting and extend the product.

The tool (Iometer and Dynamo executable) is distributed under the terms of the Intel Open Source License. The iomtr_kstat kernel module as well as other future independent components are distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License.

Answer 2

You said you'd like pretty graphs for your blog. In my use of IOMeter, I've never seen it produce a graph. However, it is possible that I overlooked an existing feature.

Alternatively, (from the look of its website) iozone might give you graphs: http://www.iozone.org/

Yet, it could be that iozone only collected the data used to create those graphs shown on its web site.

Regardless, this is still another option for I/O Benchmarking.

Answer 3

Additional server oriented disk benchmarks:

• Diskspd
• fio
• vdbench