July 13, 2008: winsat perf-testing tool
I’ve been trying to get a CF card to work as ReadyBoost memory. Still no success on that project yet; I may have more to say about that in the future.
But along the way I have discovered a neat little command line tool called winsat. This is basically the commandline underpinnings of the Windows Experience Index tool, except that it returns real numbers, rather than something fuzzy like “2.1, based on lowest subsystem score.” It was James O’Neill’s blog which tipped me off to this nifty little thing.
Let’s take it out for a quick spin. Here I am testing random IO performance for reads from the CF card (which is drive F) for large chunks of data (524288 bytes to be exact):
Overall, the disk is capable of 14.42 megabytes per second on large random reads. For comparison, my main C: drive gets 59.75 on the same test and the GUI Windows Experience rating is 5.3. So this CF disk is no speed demon, but should meet the ReadyBoost criteria.
Winsat can also test CPU, memory, and a few other things. Here are the full docs to the commandline tool. You can also access the winsat API via scripting methods, and via more formal .NET coding methods. Given that it’s built in to Vista and Windows 2008, this should be a handy tool in your troubleshooting and system baselining arsenal!
OK. So now I’ll go back to trying to make ReadyBoost work on this CF card. Wish me luck.
