Disk benchmarking tools

Now it's time to see some real disks measured. For the first few examples here, the drive being tested is a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 3 Gb/s SATA, model number ST9320423AS. This is one of the faster 2.5" laptop drives on the market, and its more detailed access time specifications were given in the IOPS section before. The results shown are from an installation into a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 running at 2.0 GHz.

We'll start with the hdtune program running on Windows, because its graphs are extremely nice and it measures almost everything you'd hope for. Its graphs demonstrate several aspects of general disk performance more clearly than the command line tools for UNIX systems covered later. ...

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