[Novalug] benchmarking iSCSI

[Kevin Dwyer]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 01:28:19PM -0400, Miguel Gonzalez Castaños wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  I have setup an HP All-in-One Storage Server with an iSCSI device that 
> I have mounted on a Debian machine.
> 
>  Unfortunately I'm not very versed on the world of benchmarking, I have 
> tried this:
> 
> svn:/etc# hdparm -tT /dev/sda1
> 
> /dev/sda1:
> Timing cached reads:   1486 MB in  1.99 seconds = 744.98 MB/sec
> Timing buffered disk reads:   12 MB in  3.50 seconds =   3.43 MB/sec
> svn:/etc# hdparm -i /dev/sda1
> 
> /dev/sda1:
> HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument
> 
> But the -i error makes me wonder if the results are reliable

hdparm is for IDE drives, so not fully compatible with SCSI drives.

For harddisk benchmarks, you can use dbench and bonnie++ and probably
many others.  Check Freshmeat or some similar place.  Searching around
in apt-cache found one I hadn't heard of called postmark, developed by
NetApp, but it looks like it may be tuned for a certain usage pattern.

-kpd