Managing SSD tools with TKperf
No Detour
TKperf combines several SSD tools under one roof. You can use TKperf to investigate SSDs before deployment and even to measure performance.
Linux offers several low-level tools for investigating solid state drives (SSDs). Admins are well advised to deploy these tools immediately, because they overwrite all data, which is a problem for SSDs in production use. One example of an SSD tool is FIO [1], an I/O-benchmarking application by Jens Axboe. Upon request, FIO bypasses the Linux page cache, starts multiple jobs in parallel, and runs with different I/O depths and workloads.
The tool can even claim Linus Torvalds' blessings. "It does things right, including writing actual pseudo-random contents, which shows if the disk does some "de-duplication" (aka "optimize for benchmarks)," Torvalds posted on Google Plus in 2012. "Anything else is suspect – forget about bonnie or other traditional tools," he added.
Hdparm [2] is also an old friend that can set and read parameters on (S)ATA hard disk drives; recent versions of Hdparm even support SSDs. Hdparm is capable of obtaining information about SSDs, and it also has a secure erase feature that erases the contents of the pages.
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