A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes).



It's been around since 1991, and is still updated today—in fact, the two latest updates (version 509 and 510) contain patches I sent in to get iozone to compile on Apple Silicon Macs running newer releases of macOS.

Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling patched iozone, a cross-platform disk benchmarking tool, to fix compilation errors on Apple Silicon Macs running newer macOS releases. The patches were submitted to the maintainer and incorporated into versions 509 and 510. The post includes build instructions and example benchmark commands for testing SSD performance on macOS, along with sample output showing ~1.5 GB/sec read/write speeds on a MacBook Neo.

I patched iozone for better disk benchmarks on modern macOS