benchmark window is not descriptive enough

[summerishere]

Binary package hint: gnome-disk-utility

This is a bug about Benchmark utility in gnome-disk-utility.

There is no warning / info if read / write tests are destructive or safe to be used on a live system.

Green lines and dots at the bottom are confusing to the user and don't tell the user what they mean.

Also , It would be awesome if there was some way that this info could be sent back to some database at ubuntu and users can see and compare what other users are getting..

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: gnome-disk-utility 2.30.1-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-27.48-generic 2.6.35.11
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-27-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Mar 3 21:43:45 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-disk-utility

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Oneiric Ocelot. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Neal McBurnett (nealmcb)]

I can confirm the first aspect of the bug for Natty - there is an "are you sure" confirmation dialog about doing a read-write test, but no hint as to whether it is destructive, or how it would manage to avoid overwriting real files. I assume it needs to have a good understanding of the file system in order to do that, but of course the file system could be new or experimental, so some clarity would help. I haven't tried Oneiric, but I doubt it has changed since I see no related bug in the gnome bugzilla:

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__all__&product=gnome-disk-utility&content=benchmark

The second issue is a duplicate of bug 794929, where it is more fully discussed.

[Neal McBurnett (nealmcb)]

Update: based on the description and screenshot at http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2010/09/21/benchmark-how-to-know-your-hard-disk-speed/ it appears that if you do ask to proceed with a write-only check, if it then notices that there is a partition table, it refuses to do the write test. So at least users aren't at risk, but it would be much more helpful if this policy was clarified on the page, and this information was given as soon as the user clicks on the initial write-test button.

[xennex82 (xennex82)]

I have no clue, or I had no clue whether it was destructive or not. I still don't know.

Actually it seems to have just wiped my partition table.

There was a GPT partition table on there and .... it is gone.

It tells you to back up your data but that is a warning given by many programs that are not destructive in the slightest (except if you mess up).

So why doesn't it just tell you it will destroy stuff? It might just as well write and then write back the original data, or actually write the original data in the first place, we can't tell.

[John Parejko (parejkoj-3)]

This seems to be very orphaned, but I'm going to ping it again as well: There is the note to "Please back up important data before using the write benchmark.", but it's not clear if that's a "we *will* delete your data" warning, or a "we *might* delete your data, but we'll try not to."

Some clarity on this, and even better an ability to do non-destructive write testing on mounted partitions, would be very good. As it is, I'm certainly not going to run the write benchmark...