Okay, here is the much belated mini-benchmarking result.
I used hdparm -tT as suggested by adf.
Here it is.
Testing environment: Debian Lenny (Titchy), internal Sandisk Extreme III CF 16gb, Hitachi microdrive 6gb (the original internal disk of 3200)
Command: hdparm -tT
http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm-T
Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison purposes. For meaningful results, this operation should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active processes) with at least a couple of megabytes of free memory. This displays the speed of reading directly from the Linux buffer cache without disk access. This measurement is essentially an indication of the throughput of the processor, cache, and memory of the system under test. If the -t flag is also specified, then a correction factor based on the outcome of -T will be incorporated into the result reported for the -t operation.
-t
Perform timings of device reads for benchmark and comparison purposes. For meaningful results, this operation should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active processes) with at least a couple of megabytes of free memory. This displays the speed of reading through the buffer cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. This measurement is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads under Linux, without any filesystem overhead. To ensure accurate measurements, the buffer cache is flushed during the processing of -t using the BLKFLSBUF ioctl. If the -T flag is also specified, then a correction factor based on the outcome of -T will be incorporated into the result reported for the -t operation.
Results:
#1 Hitachi microdrive 6gb
/dev/hdc1:
Timing cached reads: 168 MB in 2.02 seconds = 83.17 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 3.26 seconds = 1.84 MB/sec#2 Sandisk Extreme III CF 16gb
/dev/hda1:
Timing cached reads: 164 MB in 2.01 seconds = 81.59 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.26 seconds = 2.45 MB/sec
