One key thing is doing active benchmarking to validate what you're testing. See an example at http://www.brendangregg.com/ActiveBenchmarking/bonnie++.html

I usually use Bonnie++ when testing disk performance. http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/

The only thing worse than dd is bonnie++. Please, folks, use fio, or at least iozone, with multiple threads and/or a queue depth greater than one.

Are you sure? Bonnie++ has byte-wise and block-wise tests. Yes, the byte-wise tests are CPU bound (as expected), but I have not seen that for the block-wise tests on any machine so far?

Bonnie++ is heavily CPU limited and should not be used for disk benchmarking

fio or bonnie++. I've used fio with PerfKitBenchmarker in the past for some cross cloud platform comparisons.