sdb is a really simple program to benchmark disks. It only writes/reads data sequentially to/from a file and calculates the performance of this action. A memory buffer is used for input/output to get values close to the real performance of the disk or RAID system. You can use flags like O_DIRECT and O_SYNC to avoid buffering by the operating system. It is similar to dd, but there are some differences, since dd was not created for benchmarking a disk. It is possible to initialize the buffer with random values before writing them to the disk or a file on the disk. It is a simple but effective program to get the maximum speed of a disk. Due to the simplicity, you will get the results much faster than with a more complex benchmark.
