What metrics are used to evaluate the speed and efficiency of a hard drive?

Main metrics for assessing the speed and efficiency of a hard drive:

• Read/Write Speed (Throughput) — measured in megabytes per second (MB/s) and indicates how much data the disk can read or write per unit of time.
• Latency — the time it takes for the disk to start processing a request, usually measured in milliseconds (ms).
• IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) — the number of input/output operations per second, an important metric for evaluating performance with a large number of small requests.
• Access Time — the total time for seek and rotational delay, affecting data access speed.

To evaluate, utilities like hdparm, fio, iostat, or specialized benchmarks can be used.