Method and apparatus for automated analysis of hard disk drive performance

A method and apparatus is provided which reduces the equipment and time requirements for hard disk drive performance testing during manufacturing. This invention executes self-contained performance testing code that resides within the drive's manufacturing firmware, rather than relying on external testers. The invention involves exercising the drive's enqueue, dequeue, and command execution firmware, as well as the physical process of reading and writing data by simulating the host interface in code. The invention enqueues commands that typify the desired workload, allows a command ordering algorithm to sort the commands for execution, and allows the drive side code to execute the commands just as if an external host interface were attached. The invention is advantageous because the performance testing can be done by only applying power to the drive. The present invention also lends itself to performance tuning that can be done in manufacturing, to reduce drive-to-drive performance variations.