Iozone is a free open source (custom, but relaxed license) disk drive speed benchmark tester. Most recent in July 2017 is version 465 which looks about 11 months old.

Download and Compiling

Get the source from its official website.

You can get a list of build targets by just running make. I used:

make linux-AMD64

(Where AMD64 just means 64 bit).

Helpful References

Here’s a good article talking about the more sensible features of iozone:

http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/139744

The man page for iozone is pretty much useful only for reference. Also iozone -h serves this purpose too.

Useful Options

Universally Useful

-a Automatically selects tests to perform. Use this unless you have some better plan. Tests all operations for record sizes from 4k to 16M for file sizes of 64k to 512M.

File Size Options

-g # Specify maximum size in Kbytes for test files. Suffixes (k,m,g) work like: iozone -a -g 4G

-n # Same as -g but limiting the minimum file size used.

-s # Use only the specified file size. This tests only at 4G files: iozone -a -s 4G