IOMeter
Intel IOMeter is an excellent tool to test the basic properties of drives like seek time and transfer rate. All tests were conducted on the raw OS drive, many publications use a test which creates a test file on the file system. This test is not accurate because the file might not be aligned properly or could be fragmented.
We performed two tests, one random read/write with 4 KB sized blocks which is an industry standard for drive testing. A second test shows linear performance of 512 KB sized blocks which represents continuous read/write speed.