Louwrentius

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

Random 4K Write performance

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.

New release of fio-plot

I've rewritten fio-plot, a tool that turns FIO benchmark data into nice charts. It allows you to create four types of graphs which will be discussed below.

The github project page explains how to run this tool.

Fio-plot also includes a benchmark script that automates testing with Fio.

The git repository also contains benchmark data, which can be used to test fio-plot.

2D bar chart

This chart plots IOPs and latency for various queue depths.

3D bar chart

2D line chart for log data

2D bar chart latency histogram

Additional images

The github repository also contains a folder with a lot of example images.