choosing a disk to run disk/partition tests on

[ssam]

when i run a test eg iozone it seems to put its test file in my home folder. is there a simple way to get it to use a different disk or partition.

i am using v2.8.0 from the ubuntu repos.

my aim is to check that i have the correct sector alignment, so a need a test that does small reads and writes that i can run against a freshly formatted partition.

thanks

[Michael]

The easiest universal way is to modify the install directory in ~/.phoronix-test-suite/user-config.xml to reflect the location you want to test.

[ssam]

thanks that worked.

now i am wondering if iozone is the best test for this.
aligned

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=anon-211-30300-24326

unaligned

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=anon-9477-16000-29975

judging by the speeds (eg 2000 MB/s) when the file size fits in RAM then you are actually measuring RAM speed rather than disk speed. is there a better test for disks?

i am going to try again with the write tests with the disk mounted with sync ( sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt -o sync ).

[ssam]

running with sync seems way to slow to be practical. over an hour and its still on run 1 (4k, 512MB,write)