Additional Disk Performance Benchmark Tools

• Disktest: for direct device access
  Disktest can be a good example that allows to test any direct access device (and some sequential devices) while UNIX is still available to other users. Can be used to evaluate partially crashed disks. Note: The tool is too OLD. A new one is needed. This one can be a good starting point.
  
  
• Self-scaling I/O Benchmark: I/O benchmark
  It was reported in the "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" (J. L. Hennessy and D.A. Patterson, 2nd ed., 1996). I found the paper "A New Approach to I/O Performance Evaluation--Self-Scaling I/O Benchmarks, Predicted I/O Performance" (Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, May 1993) is a good source to understand the I/O benchmark. But the software package is quite complex and quite hard to use for me. I once tried it and got some results which mainly reflected cache performance. You may get the software package from the author's web site: Self-Scaling Benchmark.
  
  
• IOzone II: for File system
  IOzone is a filesystem benchmark tool. It is useful for performing a broad filesystem analysis on a given computer platform. It can test the following operations of file I/O performance: Read, write, re-read, re-write, read backwards, read strided, fread, fwrite, random read, pread ,mmap, aio_read, aio_write.