The number of new hard drives, SSDs, and other interesting storage devices due out this year is staggering. Heck, even what’s coming in just the next few months is daunting. To meet this growing tide, I’m in the process of putting together a fresh suite of tests for storage reviews. And I’m open to suggestions—reasonable ones, anyway.
Obviously, the focus of the suite will be isolating storage subsystem performance. I’d like to have a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, and I’ll probably restrict testing to Windows 7. So, what would you like to see in our new storage test suite? Keep in mind that a good benchmark test should be repeatable and offer performance metrics that are easily measurable. Ideally, tests should also be scriptable and use freely (or cheaply) available software. Oh, and relevant. Duh.
You can make suggestions in the comments below or email me directly. I should also note that a few elements of our current suite will probably migrate to the new one: IOMeter and FC-Test will definitely return, and there’s a possibility that iPEAK—or something like it—could, as well. We’ll also be doing system boot time tests and our usual level load tests with an updated collection of games.