What program to benchmark HardDrives?

[Idontcare]

Am in process of determining an optimal configuration for my harddrives, standard benchmarking stuff, and am wondering what I should use.

I see Anandtech reviews use IPEAK (discontinued by Intel?) as does StorageReviews but they all use their own database for the benchmarking which doesn't help me unless I can download their exact database.

Should I just go with Sandra and be happy? If so, which version of Sandra should I download for quick and free harddrive benchmarking, the Lite version?

 

[Seekermeister]

Try HDTach:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/HDTach_d672.html

 

[John]

The Official StorageReview.com Take on HD benchmarks

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: John
The Official StorageReview.com Take on HD benchmarks

John, you the man. Exactly what I needed. Thanks for taking the time to help me save a ton of time.

Seekermeister, thanks for the input, but in an self-consistent twist of fate the exact reason I found HDtach to be useless in my case happens to be the same reason (see my bolding below) StorageReview ranked the program low in John's link:

3. HDTach 2.xx

Strengths: Measures read and write STR. Presents a reasonable measurement of access time.

Weaknesses: STR is NOT representative of real-world performance. The STR measurements are taken from sample sectors staggered across the drive, often rendering results for RAID configurations useless. This is because this method often means a particular sample reading doesn't cross stripe boundaries, therefore producing results equal or similar to single-drive results.

I am benchmarking raid-0 arrays in varying configs, and HDtach will "drop" the measured bandwidth in quantized fashion from one 2-drives to 1-drive, etc. Easy to see and take account of, but makes "averages" a meaningless metric of comparison across array configs. Glad to see I wasn't seeing those funky hdtach graphs for no good reason.