On Sat, 17 Dec 2005, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 02:34:53PM +0000, Martin J. Laubach wrote:
> >   I'd like to redo fefe's benchmarks, so that we have a stable
> > baseline from which we can re-run the benchmarks after major
> > changes have gone in.
> 
> The best thing to do is to go out and get a few identical, cheap
> hard drives, and simply tuck them away with each OS and revision to
> be benchmarked installed in the test configuration.  Then you can
> rerun your old benchmarks any time.  Of course, you can use ghost
> to do something similar to this without the physical disks -- but
> they are cheap, and convenient, so I just use the disks.

Just a note - I recently did a bunch of profiling on 200GB drives. I found
that even the same brand, same model, of hard drive, when installed on the
same channel of the same controller (i.e. shutdown, swap drives, boot) can
show a significant variance in throughput under test.

I saw a range of 5MB/s difference. If your tests depend on disk much, you
may want to profile the bare drives first.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
(About an Amiga rendering landscapes) It's not thinking, it's being artistic!
					      - Jamie Woods