showersky

    IOZone http://www.iozone.org - this is a very thorough file system benchmark that examines performance across a large range of parameters (file size, block size, # of threads, etc...). The implementation seems to also be more efficient than Bonnie, because for comparable performance levels, there is more CPU idle time using iozone. This is a fairly general tool that can be used to get far more information than you really wanted to know about IO performance.

    Bonnie http://www.textuality.com/bonnie/ - this is a fairly easy to use benchmark that measures performance for sequential and random IO, at the block and character level. The results it gives are generally similar to iozone for throughput. However, as mentioned above, IOZone can measure more things, and seems to run more efficiently.

    PostMark http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3022.html - this is a benchmark that specifically examines lots of small random I/Os across a large number of files. It is meant to simulate the disk access patterns of NNTP servers. These access patterns don't really correspond to our HENP applications, but may be relevant to performance for compiling code.