Iometer for Zoned Block Devices

Iometer is widely used in the industry to benchmark storage devices. Storage device vendors and OEMs that integrate it into their systems use these benchmarks to evaluate if the new generation of drives are any better than the previous generation.

The problem arises when these Iometer benchmark profiles are used to evaluate Shingled Magnetic Drives. Iometer does not have any intelligence of what a storage device is capable off.

Since ZAC/ZBC support not available in common file systems or Windows device driver stack, my presentation will show the modifications I made to Iometer to make it’s IO generation aware of the Zoned-Block ATA Devices to better evaluate their performance & compare those results to Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) devices.

Learning Objectives

Performance issues with SMR devices
Iometer (dynamo) code review
Changes to Iometer/dynamo code
Highlighting the challenges with this approach