G''Day Folks, I''ve just added iopattern to the DTraceToolkit. It''s a nice idea from Ryan Matteson. Here is a find command flogging the disks, # iopattern %RAN %SEQ COUNT MIN MAX AVG KR KW 86 14 400 1024 8192 1543 603 0 81 19 455 1024 8192 1606 714 0 89 11 469 512 8192 1854 550 299 83 17 463 1024 8192 1782 806 0 87 13 394 1024 8192 1551 597 0 85 15 348 512 57344 2835 808 155 91 9 513 512 47616 2812 570 839 76 24 317 512 35840 3755 562 600 ^C We can see it is running at around 85% random activity, with an average size of about 2 Kb. Now a "dd" command to cause a massive sequential read, # iopattern %RAN %SEQ COUNT MIN MAX AVG KR KW 1 99 377 4096 131072 130061 47884 0 0 100 409 131072 131072 131072 52352 0 0 100 410 131072 131072 131072 52480 0 0 100 414 131072 131072 131072 52992 0 0 100 421 1024 131072 130763 53760 1 0 100 413 131072 131072 131072 52864 0 0 100 417 131072 131072 131072 53376 0 0 100 420 131072 131072 131072 53760 0 0 100 421 131072 131072 131072 53888 0 0 100 404 11776 131072 130776 51584 11 ^C ... Events are considered random if the disk heads seek. I''m not measuring the size of that seek. Hope it''s useful! cheers, Brendan [Sydney, Australia]