Strontium/HP/Sandisk/Kingston pendrive/thumbdrive seek times benchmark.

Here I'll benchmark the seek times of various thumbdrives. Seeks times are useful when you're syncing Bitcoin/Altcoin wallets.

I'm using the seeker tool for the purpose. All units in ms.

HP -- 0.53
Kingston -- 2.2
Sandisk cruiser blade -- 0.88
Sandisk cruser micro -- 0.73
Amkette robusto 0.93
Strontium Bold -- 0.64
Strontium TNT -- 1.06 
Transcend Jet USB 3.0 -- 0.7ms (on USB 2.0)

















As expected, Kingston is the most popular and worst brand which's expected cause it's the people's top choice, similar to Windows.

Altcoin/bitcoin/litecoin difficulty, block graph/CVS generator.

This bash script will generate CSV output for any altcoin/Bitcoin given the path of it's daemon binary. It makes RPC calls via the binary to a running altcoin/Bitcoin server to generate a CSV value to stdout. You can plot it later on in Libreoffice Calc.

#!  /bin/bash
# generates comma separated value of blockno. and  it's difficulty at custom block intervels and range 
#first_argument bin name
#second argument block interval to sample difficulty (optional)
#third argument start from block (optional)
# fourth argument last block till which to analyze
# name of binary (with full path if not in $PATH)
bin=$1
declare -i block_intervel
declare -i start_from
declare -i end_till
block_intervel=$2
start_from=$3
end_till=$4
if [[ $block_intervel = 0 ]]
then
 block_intervel=1
fi
if [[ $end_till = 0 ]]
then
 end_till=$($bin getblockcount)
fi
echo block,diff
while [[ $start_from -le $end_till ]]
do
 echo -n $start_from,
 $bin getblock $($bin getblockhash $start_from) | grep difficulty  | cut -d : -f2 | sed -e s/,// -e s/\ //
 start_from=start_from+block_intervel
done

Copy-paste this in a text file and give it a .sh extension. Read the comment to learn how to use it.