I have had the need to test hard drive performance in both Windows and Linux. Here is information on how you can perform hard drive performance tests in both environments.

LINUX:
   /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/sda
 
   (sda should be whichever drive you actually wish to test)

  This measures sequential access rates. Here is an axample of output from one of my machines.

     /dev/sda1:
    Timing cached reads:   3092 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1546.54 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads:  182 MB in  3.03 seconds =  60.05 MB/sec

 Here is the pertinent output from the MAN pages regarding this command:

       -T     Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison purposes.  For meaningful results,  this  opera-
              tion  should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active processes) with at least
              a couple of megabytes of free memory.  This displays the speed of reading directly  from  the  Linux  buffer
              cache  without  disk access.  This measurement is essentially an indication of the throughput of the proces-
              sor, cache, and memory of the system under test.  If the -t flag is also specified, then a correction factor
              based on the outcome of -T will be incorporated into the result reported for the -t operation.

       -t     Perform  timings of device reads for benchmark and comparison purposes.  For meaningful results, this opera-
              tion should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active processes) with at  least
              a  couple  of  megabytes of free memory.  This displays the speed of reading through the buffer cache to the
              disk without any prior caching of data.  This measurement is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain
              sequential  data  reads  under Linux, without any filesystem overhead.  To ensure accurate measurements, the
              buffer cache is flushed during the processing of -t using the BLKFLSBUF ioctl.  If the -T flag is also spec-
              ified, then a correction factor based on the outcome of -T will be incorporated into the result reported for
              the -t operation.

There is also a utility called seeker, available for download at the bottom of the article at http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html which will measure the speed of Random disk access.


WINDOWS:

There is a utility for testing hard drive performance in Windows called HD Tune. The free version, for personal use, will measure read performance and the professional version ($34.95 at the time of this writing) will measure write performance as well. It also has many other functionalities as well. I have attached a screenshot of HD Tune output.

   It can be downloaded from http://www.hdtune.com