Benchmarking a 1.44 MB Floppy Drive

Tue 17 December 2019 Category: Hardware

I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its random I/O performance. I have no real reason for doing this. I just thought it was funny.

I've run a benchmark against the floppy drives for different queue depths. The results are shared below.

Random 4K Read performance

read

Random 4K Write performance

write

Conclusion

These images show that 1.44 MB a floppy drive have atrocious random I/O performance as compared to hard drives or solid state drives. Who knew!

Next: benchmarking random I/O performance of a tape drive. If somebody will lend me one.

Tools used

I used fio to benchmark the floppy drive. I've used fio-plot to generate the images. The benchmarks were run using an altered version of the benchmark script included with fio-plot.

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