Partition alignment

http://blogs.sun.com/dlutz/entry/partition_alignment_guidelines_for_unified

Very good and detailed article regarding storage partition alignment. Non-aligned partitions could make a very significant impact on the performance, and there is explanation why. And the guidline how to cound and align partitions as a bonus.

Couple of useful Dtrace articles

Using DTrace to understand mpstat and vmstat output

Observing I/O Behavior With The DTraceToolkit

File System workload generator

In addition to the previous post:

FileBench looks like a perfect tool for the load generation.

Here is the article explaining why dd is not the best way to measure HDD performance. The main point is no multithreading in it. vdbench is recommended.