I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its random I/O performance. I have no real reason for doing this. I just thought it was funny.

I've run a benchmark against the floppy drives for different queue depths. The results are shared below.

Random 4K Read performance

Random 4K Write performance

Conclusion

These images show that 1.44 MB a floppy drive have atrocious random I/O performance as compared to hard drives or solid state drives. Who knew!

Next: benchmarking random I/O performance of a tape drive. If somebody will lend me one.

Tools used

I used fio to benchmark the floppy drive. I've used fio-plot to generate the images. The benchmarks were run using an altered version of the benchmark script included with fio-plot.