How to test hard drive throughput

[Brazen]

For those who haven't heard, TrueCrypt 5.0 was just released and now supports encrypting the system drive (accessible via it's own boot loader). So anyway, I would like to see what impact the different levels of encryption have on my laptop.

So does anybody have any thoughts on what is a good and free/open-source utility for measuring harddrive performance. I'm thinking maybe something that gives 'real-world' performance testing and also some throughput numbers.

 

[QuixoticOne]

If you want "real world" type performance benchmarks there are a bunch of things like OfficeMark, SISOFT Sandra application oriented benchmarks, etc. that will time how long certain applications take to start, open files, do a few things, close, open new files, etc. Most any major benchmark suite has application / business oriented options that'd work for you.

If you want more synthetic disk performance numbers for doing I/O in small blocks/files, large blocks/files, and everything in between, check out some of the common disk performance benchmarks in some of those benchmark suites.

If you just want something quick and dirty to try yourself, make a directory with a lot more files than will fit in your RAM, say 15 GB or whatever, a mix of lots of small files (1K - 1MB) and a few large (gigabyte size) ones take a stopwatch and time how long it takes to copy that folder to another spot.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
If you want "real world" type performance benchmarks there are a bunch of things like OfficeMark, SISOFT Sandra application oriented benchmarks, etc. that will time how long certain applications take to start, open files, do a few things, close, open new files, etc. Most any major benchmark suite has application / business oriented options that'd work for you.

If you want more synthetic disk performance numbers for doing I/O in small blocks/files, large blocks/files, and everything in between, check out some of the common disk performance benchmarks in some of those benchmark suites.

If you just want something quick and dirty to try yourself, make a directory with a lot more files than will fit in your RAM, say 15 GB or whatever, a mix of lots of small files (1K - 1MB) and a few large (gigabyte size) ones take a stopwatch and time how long it takes to copy that folder to another spot.

Ok, I've found and downloaded the free version of SiSoft Sandra, but I couldn't find any benchmark tool named OfficeMark.

 

[Pabster]

TrueCrypt 5 is fantastic.

I'm using full-disk (system) encryption on a few machines and haven't noticed any measurable slowdown at all.

Something which makes extensive use of the disk, like PAR file recovery, might give you an idea.

 

[mechBgon]

If you happened to have an Office administrative installation point around, copy it over to the HDD, then install Office from it and time the completion. Encrypt & repeat. I used to do this benchmark occasionally to demonstrate the powars of 15k SCSI :evil:

 

[SoulAssassin]

How, or actually when, does it do the encryption? Some of the full disk encryption software utilities do an encrypt/decrypt at start-up/shutdown. If it's not encrypting everything until you shut down then your daily work isn't affected but it could take 15 minutes to shut down. Need to understand how the application works before you can do a real analysis.

 

[hclarkjr]

do search for hdtune, i think it will give you what you are looking for

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin
How, or actually when, does it do the encryption? Some of the full disk encryption software utilities do an encrypt/decrypt at start-up/shutdown. If it's not encrypting everything until you shut down then your daily work isn't affected but it could take 15 minutes to shut down. Need to understand how the application works before you can do a real analysis.

It is on-the-fly, as you work. No need to let it go for hours doing just encryption. All data written to the disk is encrypted on-the-fly, and decrypted on-the-fly as it is read in.