http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/3029/

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2001022200520PSHW

Modern desktop computers are so fast in all respects that we often have the luxury of ignoring performance issues. (People like me who started with a 1MHz processor have no trouble remembering how we lusted after every extra slice of CPU speed.) But if you're in a position where you need or want to maximize your computer's speed, all but the most compute-bound tasks will likely benefit from a faster disk drive system. Which raises the question: Aside from reading specs (which are really just a first cousin to statistics in terms of veracity), how do you evaluate the performance of a disk drive?

My favorite tool in this area is iozone, a relatively small but full-featured open source program for benchmarking disk systems. iozone was written by William Norcott and Don Capps, with contributions credited in the source code from several other people, and it can be built for over two dozen OS's and versions, including Linux, Windows (32-bit), several BSD's, and Solaris.