I use scripts I wrote myself in combination with Linux CLI tools (dd, iostat). They give me 6 pieces of information: sustained sequential read and write through

I use scripts I wrote myself in combination with Linux CLI tools (dd, iostat). They give me 6 pieces of information: sustained sequential read and write throughput (at different LBA offsets), read and write latency (4kB I/O with queue depth of 1), and random read and write IOPS (4kB I/O with queue depth of at least 32, and, if necessary, using random data to characterize the effectiveness of any dedup/compression feature). That's it. Once I have these 6 synthetic results, that gives me more and better information than 9 out of 10 benchmarking articles on the Net. I usually don't need more complex synthetic benchmark results (eg. x% read / y% write). After that I simply test the real workload.