If you have been around computer systems long enough everyone knows how import disk performance is, espeacially with database systems. There’s the standard htparm -tT and dd test the everyone does, but it really does give you the whole picture. What you really want is to test read, write, re-read, re-write, read backwards, read strided, fread, fwrite, random read, pread ,mmap, aio_read, and aio_write. For that I would recommend using Iozone. It gives you a better idea of what’s going on.