Storage Performance & Resilience Archives

Identifying Optane drives in Linux

Published: July 15, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in Storage Hardware and Devices, nvme, optane by gary. Leave a Comment on Identifying Optane drives in Linux.

How to identify optane drives in linux OS using lspci.

Microsoft diskspd Part 3. Oddities and FAQ

Published: April 22, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in diskspd, diskspd, windows by gary. Leave a Comment on Microsoft diskspd Part 3. Oddities and FAQ.

Tips and tricks for using diskspd especially useful for those familar with tools like fio

Microsoft diskspd. Part 2 How to bypass NTFS Cache.

Published: April 7, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in diskspd, benchmarking, diskspd, windows by gary. Leave a Comment on Microsoft diskspd. Part 2 How to bypass NTFS Cache..

How to ensure performance testing with diskspd is stressing the underlying storage devices, not the OS filesystem.

Microsoft diskspd. Part 1 Preparing to test.

Published: March 30, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in diskspd, benchmarking, diskspd, storage, windows by gary. Leave a Comment on Microsoft diskspd. Part 1 Preparing to test..

How to install and setup diskspd before starting your first performance tests and avoiding wrong results due to null byte issues.

How to identify NVME drive types and test throughput

Published: March 17, 2020 (Updated: July 15, 2020) in NVME Performance, fio, nvme by gary.

Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?

Published: March 13, 2020 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in SSD Performance, benchmarking, kernel, linux, ssd, storage by gary. Leave a Comment on Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?.

First things First Why do we tend to use 1MB IO sizes for throughput benchmarking? To achieve the maximum throughput on a storage device, we will usually use a large IO size to maximize the amount of data is transferred per IO request. The idea is to make the ratio of data-transfers to IO requests […]

How to identify SSD types and measure performance.

Published: March 9, 2020 (Updated: March 17, 2020) in SSD Performance, fio, samsung, ssd by gary.

The real-world achievable SSD performance will vary depending on factors like IO size, queue depth and even CPU clock speed. It’s useful to know what the SSD is capable of delivering in the actual environment in which it’s used. I always start by looking at the performance claimed by the manufacturer. I use these figures […]

Creating compressible data with fio.

Published: October 18, 2016 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in fio, benchmark, compression, fio, nutanix by gary.

Today I used fio to create some compressible data to test on my Nutanix nodes. I ended up using the following fio params to get what I wanted. buffer_compress_percentage=50 refill_buffers buffer_pattern=0xdeadbeef buffer_compress_percentage does what you’d expect and specifies how compressible the data is refill_buffers Is required to make the above compress percentage do what you’d […]

Specifying Drive letters with fio for Windows.

Published: October 5, 2016 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in fio, benchmark, fio, iops, windows by gary.

Simple fio file for using Drive letters on Windows. This will create a file called “fiofile” on the F:\ Drive in Windows. Notice that the specification is “Driveletter” “Backslash” “Colon” “Filename” In fio terms we are “escaping” the “:” which fio traditionally uses as a file separator. [global] bs=1024k size=1G time_based runtime=30 rw=read direct=1 iodepth=8 […]

Things to know when using vdbench.

Published: September 21, 2015 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in vdbench, fio, vdbench by gary.

Recently I found that vdbench was not giving me the amount of outstanding IO that I had intended to configure by using the “threads=N” parameter. It turned out that with Linux, most of the filesystems (ext2, ext3 and ext4) do not support concurrent directIO, although they do support directIO. This was a bit of a […]

SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data.

Published: June 16, 2015 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in Storage Hardware and Devices, nutanix, sas, sata, scsi by gary. Leave a Comment on SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data..

The question of why Nutanix uses SATA drive comes up sometimes, especially from customers who have experienced very poor performance using SATA on traditional arrays. I can understand this anxiety. In my time at NetApp we exclusively used SAS or FC-AL drives in performance test work. At the time there was a huge difference in performance between […]

Multiple devices/jobs in fio

Published: June 17, 2014 (Updated: February 28, 2020) in fio, benchmark, fio by gary.

If your underlying filesystem/devices have different response times (e.g. some devices are cached – or are on SSD) and others are on spinning disk, then the behavior of fio can be quite different depending on how the fio config file is specified. Typically there are two approaches 1) Have a single “job” that has multiple […]