Bonnie++ vs Illumine IT disk-benchmark

Bonnie++ is a free, command-line benchmark suite for measuring filesystem and disk I/O performance on Linux. It exercises sequential input and output, rewrites, random seeks, and file operations including creation, stat, and deletion of many small files. The project describes these workloads as useful for investigating I/O bottlenecks in I/O-intensive applications, including database work, and for simulating file activity associated with Squid or INN. Bonnie++ can test more than 2 GB of storage on a 32-bit machine. Its -D option enables direct I/O for bulk tests, while -b calls fsync after each write and syncs the directory after file creation or deletion. Semaphore support can synchronize multiple instances. Results can be emitted as plain text or CSV, with companion tools to convert CSV into HTML or formatted plain text. The project is licensed under GPL version 2.0, and the repository includes source code and Debian, RPM, and Sun-related packaging files. Its documentation warns against running the benchmark on live production machines because it can affect services and consume disk space or inodes.

Illumine IT disk-benchmark is a lightweight console program for benchmarking hard drives, SSDs, SAN disks, HBAs, RAID adapters and storage controllers. It can test physical or virtual disks that are local or remote, using multiple threads to simulate concurrent reads and writes. Test options include random file sizes, random delays, write-only runs and configurable read and write buffer sizes. Results show read and write timings per thread and as averages, summary results, and CPU and wall time. Output can be reduced to values for spreadsheet use, and the program can print system I/O information to help set buffer sizes. Continuous runs can monitor cloud-drive QoS, disk replication and active/passive RAID swaps. The tool is free and described as an open-source C command-line program. Listed platforms are Linux and Windows; its broader supported-platform list also names POSIX and MS-DOS. Linux build instructions require GCC and list POSIX Threads as the only dependency. The README warns that continuous runs with many threads, large files and no delay can fill the tested disk and cause high CPU load.