Visual basic; benchmark program

Well, I need to make a utility in visual basic, so i will make a benchmark. I figure, i can make it calculate pi, and save the results as a text file, and once the text file reaches a certain size, it stops, and spits out the time.
And/Or, i could make it make, then read, then delete a text file, which would be a good hdd bench.

Any ideas as to how I can go about this?

 

i'm not sure about how good a benchmark creating/opening/reading/closing/deleting a file is of a hdd. The most important thing for a HDD to do well is memory management. What you are looking at, is more OS stuff, mixed with short spasmodic bursts across the file storage. Memory tends to require continous lumps of data (due to prinicple of locality), and esp. on things like databases - where very large data is required in large lumps. If you could get your hdd benchmark program to open up like a database (eg Access, or MySQL) and moniter hdd activity as the database completes a pre-defined list of queries, then would get an important benchmark for a hdd. If you wanted to keep it simple, a crude method of hdd activity, would be to have your file creating/opening...etc program to run, and see how long that takes. If you also run the program before or after running and closing the database, you would get a crude idea of activity of the hard drive... i.e. - (this is rough - but still workable) since the hard drive will be getting X amount of work done , in Y amount of time (where Y is variable on the ability of the hard drive), then by diving X by Y, we get the speed of the hdd (this is an average speed, mind - over a short period of time... so can only give you a snap shot of the hdd's perfomance). We could work this out (appromixately) by subtracting the time of the file program+db by the time of the file program on its own.

If we wanted a graph of the speed of the hdd for the duration of the db's running, one way to achieve this would be to run the file create/open...etc program to running over and over for the duration of the db running. Each snap shot of the file program can be put back to back to give a "graph" of the hdd's activity.

Its not hard to do, although - obviously more time consuming than your original idea - but for whoever you have to do this program for, should be impressed.

 

Yeah, its just for school, all i need is a very crude way of doing it, nothing fancy. I need to use visual, though, and i dont really have a database handy, but i could easily make a large, random text document using notepad.

This is a highshool course, btw, and the teacher doesnt care how crude it is.

 

off topic (sorry) -

so you guys learn how to calculate pi at high school? thats pretty good - we don't get to learn until about 17. (and thats only if you choose to do maths - out of a choice of 4!!).

Or does your high school go up to 18 (i forget the american system)

At the mo - my VB is off a bit... haven't used it in an age.... but i'll find my old VB reference book - and look up the commands for you.

 

Thanks very much; and no, i dont know how to calculate pi, but it would be simple to ask a math teacher how to do it.

I dont like visual, and the teacher doesnt know the program, making it pure madness. My school is so ghetto.....