Today I've discovered simple disk benchmark written in C and I wanted to give a very minimal version of it a try in rust. Let's explore the new crate and command line tool ssd-benchmark and discover how simple it actually is to benchmark a disk.

Updated: 2020-05-09 for version 1.1.0

Purpose of life

This tool has just one single purpose: it measures the writing performance of your hard disk on macOS and Linux - more precisely spoken, of the disk under your CWD.

First, it measures the writing time and throughput by using random data from rand crate and writing sequentially chunks of 8MB until a total 1GB is written.

After that it writes this random data 8 times again on disk and measures the respective average writing time and throughput.

Quick Start

Install

To install the ssd-benchmark tool, you just need to run

cargo install --force ssd-benchmark

(--force just makes it update to the latest version if it's already installed)

To verify that the installation went through, you can run ssd-benchmark that should output similar to

$HOME/.cargo/bin/ssd-benchmark

Usage

$ ssd-benchmark

###             Super Simple Disk Benchmark              ###
## Star me on https://github.com/sassman/ssd-benchmark-rs ##

Filling buffer with 8 MB random data...
Initilisation of buffer done               4890 ms

Starting benchmark...

Perform sequential writing of total 1024 MB in 8 MB chunks
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Total time                                 2522 ms
Throughput                               512.00 MB/s

Perform 8 write cycles of 1024 MB
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Total time                                29598 ms
Min write time                             2516 ms
Max write time                             4934 ms
Range write time                           2418 ms
Average write time μ                       3699 ms
Standard deviation σ                        801 ms

Min throughput                           207.54 MB/s
Max throughput                           407.00 MB/s
Average throughput Ø                     276.83 MB/s
Standard deviation σ                      64.76 MB/s

The great thing is, there are no parameters or options.

Missing something?

If you miss a feature, file an issue on github and don't forget to star the repo.

Thanks for reading and don't miss out to give feedback :)

Used versions:

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.43.0 (4fb7144ed 2020-04-20)
$ cargo --version
cargo 1.43.0 (3532cf738 2020-03-17)