Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark

Cold-Cache Sequential I/O Benchmark: Open-Source Disk Read Performance Testing

Measuring disk read performance, Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark writes test files to disk and reads them back sequentially to test hard drive read speed.

What is Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark?

Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark is an open source command-line disk benchmarking utility for testing hard drive read performance. It works by first writing temporary test files of set sizes to the target drive, then reading those files back sequentially. This simulates the experience of reading cold data that is not cached in memory.

By testing sequential read speed from an uncached cold state, it provides metrics on real-world disk read performance for applications like audio/video editing or database access. Factors like file system fragmentation and disk access times are exposed. It gives accurate measurements unaffected by OS cache hits.

The results can help identify disk bottlenecks when load times for certain tasks seem slow. If the cold read speeds are much lower than the device's advertised speeds, there may be an underlying hardware or software issue. The tool provides the raw throughput in megabytes per second, as well as reporting other relevant statistics.

Overall, Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark is useful for media production teams, data engineers, cloud engineers, or anyone wanting uncached disk metrics to diagnose performance issues or storage upgrades. As an open-source tool it can be customized and integrated into disk testing suites.

Cold-cache Sequential I/O Benchmark Features

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