xdd is not "extreme dd"
While the ladies and gentlemen at IO Performance Inc. are busy with their 7.0 "Phoenix" release, they have left their website in disrepair including the disappearance of their product, source code and documentation.
Since I make heavy use of xdd and apparently I am not the only one that needed the documentation, source and binary; I have provided it here for everyone.
xdd65.013007.tar xdd6.5 documentation
To explain what xdd is:
Xdd is a tool for measuring and characterizing disk subsystem I/O on single systems and clusters of systems. It is a command-line based tool that grew out of the UNIX world and has been ported to run in Window’s environments as well. It is designed to provide consistent and reproducible performance measurements of disk I/O traffic. There are three basic components to xdd that include the xdd program itself, a timeserver program, and a gettime program. The timeserver and gettime programs are used to synchronize the clocks of xdd programs simultaneously running across multiple computer systems.