IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.
IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are:
- Transfer Request Size
- Percent Random/Sequential distribution.
- Percent Read/Write Distribution
- Aligned I/O’s.
- Reply Size
- TCP/IP status
- Burstiness.
Whilst measuring the IO for a hard drive is a little pointless as it is never going to match that of a solid state drive, however, we do get to see the drives access time, averaging out at 445ms.
It’s an ideal little drive.