Benchmarking Disk Performance

Phoronix Test Suite

Supported Operating Systems:Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac
Website:https://www.phoronix.com/

The Phoronix Test Suite is a collection of benchmarking and stress testing tools. It is a very complete set of tools but comes with a little learning curve. With these tools, you can test everything, RAM, CPU, Storage, and Network. The test suite is a module framework and has more than 400 tests available by default. It can also be completely automated and customized to deliver specific return data or simple booleans.

The fastest way to have the tool up and running is by using their Docker image. Here is the code to get you jump-started into the tools.

 apt update && apt install docker.io docker -y 
 docker pull phoronix/pts 
 docker run -it phoronix/pts

This will drop you into the interactive tool interface. There are a few different storage-related tests that can be run but I prefer the “fio” test. You can run “list-all-tests” to get a complete list of tests the default install offers.

At the interactive command prompt run “benchmark fio”. You will be asked a few questions about how you what to set up the test. After the test runs you will get a list of results. The really helpful thing is that the tool provides average results of other systems that you can compare your results to.