In your opinion...

What are the best programs to benchmark HD's? I plan to do my own little home grown shootout and need to know which benchmarks people would like to see the results from.

One catch, the programs have to be free.

My focus of this test is to comapare the WD 80GB SE drives in and the Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM 2MB cache drives. I will probably focus mostly on the RAID aspect, but I can also get some benchmarks for the individual drives too.

ATTO & Intel's IO Meter but needs a degree to use.

Anybody have any suggestiong on anything else they would like to see? I guess I am going to go for the 16KB cluster /16KB stripe size. I also might try doing some general file moving (probably with larger .zip files) I dont know if I will have to time them or if I will be able to run them side by side.

I like IOMeter best. I have also used ATTO and Sandra. ATTO is better than Sandra for most users. I find some value in Sandra (where most people wouldn't because my discipline is as a database administrator and knowing the sustained read rate for large files for me is relevant. IOMeter takes a good amount of getting used to. I would suggest starting with ATTO.

Dave

I have been looking into IOmeter and I plan to at least give it a shot (I'll probably play with it for a couple days before I do any tests)