From: Benchmarking

See the comp.benchmarks FAQ, and don't believe everything a vendor
tells you.

There's a good paper on a new I/O benchmarking technique that also
covers the pitfalls of I/O benchmarking in the Nov. '94 ACM
Transactions on Computer Systems -- "A New Approach to I/O Performance
Evaluation -- Self-Scaling I/O Benchmarks, Predicted I/O Performance",
Peter Chen and David Patterson.

Bonnie, IOZONE, IOBENCH, nhfsstone, one of the SPECs (SFS), are all
useful for measuring I/O performance. There is also a program called
BENCHMARK available from infotech@digex.com -- apparently a
standardized set of scripts to test remote access to mass storage
systems.

In particular, note that based on a discussion here recently (8/96),
it appears that some magazines (who ought to know better) are using
HDT BenchTest as a disk drive performance measure, with the I/O sizes
set so small that the disk drive cache is covering them all, resulting
in anomalously high data rates (especially write rates).

http://home.hkstar.com/~tamws/comp/bench/hdbench.htm is the start of a
reasonable-looking benchmark for PC hard drives (posted by
tamws@hkstar.com, 9/96)

 ==== SPEC SFS ====  

SPEC's System-level File Server (SFS) workload measures NFS server
performance. It uses one server and two or more "load generator"
clients.

SPEC-SFS is not free; it costs US$1,200 from the SPEC corporation.
There's a FAQ about SPEC posted sometimes in comp.benchmarks.