CLI filesystem benchmark for random read/write with specified block size

Question

I'm in search of a filesystem benchmark utility. I basically want to run a test which should be able to do random reads/writes on a specified drive with a given block size. e.g. a 4K random write on a linux system.

Answer 1

Check the Linux Benchmark Suite page. It has links to a bunch of benchmarks, including bonie and bonie++ which can do what you want (and more).

For bonnie++, to change the block size, you might also need to specify the test file size.

usage: bonnie++ [-d scratch-dir] [-s size(MiB)[:chunk-size(b)]]

So bonnie++ ... -s 1g:4k ... should do I/O in 4096 byte chunks.

Also check out iozone. It has a scary number of command line arguments, but r can be used to fix the block size. Check out the documentation to understand the output.