Benchmarking Io

The main reason to upgrade my networking speed is to see improved throughput and latencies (duh).

But I want to know, how much does it help in real-world usage? As I wait to pull the trigger on ordering the equipment, my inner-yak-shaver comes out again.

I’ve used CrystalDiskMark in the past, because it’s pretty popular, at least in the Windows arena, and similar alternatives exist for Mac and Linux systems.

However, I wanted to see if a CLI based system might be more interesting to get the data I’m looking for. fio might fit the bill. A windows binary is available, and it’s just an apt-get away on my preferred Linux distro, as well as available on MacOS with homebrew.

With standardized output, I may be able to parse the output and graph/compare the results. Right now, everything is in a google sheet, and it’s super hard to compare between different disks and systems.

There were some minor hiccups getting it to run on Win 10. Tip: Don’t run it in a cygwin shell, and you’ll need to use the --thread option since forking isn’t available.