NAME
zcav - program to test raw hard drive throughput.
SYNOPSIS
zcav file-name [count] [block-size]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the zcav, program.
Modern hard drives have a constant rotational speed but have varying numbers of sectors per track (outside tracks are longer and have more sectors). This is referred to as Zoned Constant Angular Velocity (or ZCAV). The outer tracks will have a higher data transfer rate due to having more sectors per track, these tracks generally have the lower track/sector numbers.
This program tests the ZCAV performance of a hard drive, by reading the entire data on it a specified number of times. The file name given as the first parameter, it can be specified as -, for standard input. This file will be opened as read-only and in usual operation it will be /dev/hdX. The first parameter is the number of times to read through the specified file or device (default 1). The second parameter is the block size in mega-bytes (default 100).
The output should be able to be easily graphed with gnuplot which is what I use to view the results.
AUTHOR
This program, it's manual page, and the Debian package were written by Russell Coker <[email protected]>.