Bonnie++ vs Parkdale

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.

Parkdale measures read and write speeds for hard disks, CD-ROM devices and network servers. Its three access modes offer different ways to run a drive test. QuickAccess checks sequential and random access with 4KB blocks and 32 concurrent threads. FileAccess reads and writes test data in a regular file through the filesystem; BlockAccess works directly with disk sectors and displays transfer rates over time. Users can compare and submit drive results on the Benchmark page. The Windows version has command-line options for the drive, file size, block size and log-file creation, and installation is available through winget and Chocolatey. Parkdale runs on Windows, macOS and Android, with the maker listing operating systems from Windows 11 through Windows 98, macOS 27 through 10.7, and Android 12 through 4.4. The free software is supported by donations. The maker says crash reporting and automatic update checks can be disabled; those functions send a unique non-personal ID and operating-system version, and IP addresses are recorded to distinguish usage countries.