Iometer
Iometer is storage testing software tool that simulates application input/output to main storage on hard disk, SSD or storage networking devices.
Iometer is designed for use in both single systems and clusters. The tool allows users to set custom input/output profiles to simulate different application workloads. Iometer is a useful benchmarking tool for storage; it's often used to test storage solution performance as well as different settings in the software environment. The tool can be used to measure virtual disk performance by simulating environments with customizable workloads.
Iometer was created by Intel in 1998. The company stopped development in 2001 and gave the project over to the open source community.
See an introduction to Iometer performance testing: