Tag: storage

Microsoft diskspd. Part 1 Preparing to test.

Posted on by gary

Installing Disk-Speed (diskspd).

Overview

diskspd operates on windows filesystems, and will read / write to one or more files concurrently.

The NULL byte problem

By default, when diskspd creates a file it is a file full of NULL bytes. Many storage systems (at least NetApp and Nutanix that I know of) will optimize the layout NULL byte files. This means that test results from NULL byte files will not reflect the performance of real applications that write actual data.

Suggested work-around

To avoid overly optimistic results, first create the file, then write a randomized data pattern to the file before doing any testing.

Create a file using diskspd -c. e.g. for a 32G file on drive D: then overwrite with random data.

diskspd.exe -c32G D:\testfile1.dat

This will create a 32G file full of NULL bytes

Default write command sends NULL bytes to disk

Then overwrite with a random pattern

diskspd.exe -w100 -Zr D:\testfile1.dat
same file after being overwritten with diskspd -w100 -Zr
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Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?

Posted on by gary

First things First

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CDC9762-smd-drive.jpg
CDC 9762 SMD disk drive from 1974

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 as large as possible to reduce the CPU overhead of the actual IO request so we can get as close to the device bandwidth as possible. To take advantage of and pre-fetching, and to reduce the need for head movement in rotational devices, a sequential pattern is used.

For historical reasons, many storage testers will use a 1MB IO size for sequential testing. A typical fio command line might look like something this.

fio --name=read --bs=1m --direct=1 --filename=/dev/sda
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