Obtaining timely and accurate information about the low-level characteristics of disk drives presents a problem for system design and implementation alike. This paper presents a collection of three disk microbenchmarks which combine to empirically extract a relevant subset of disk geometry and performance parameters in an efficient and accurate manner, without requiring a priori information of the drive being measured. Novel among the benchmarks is the utilization of linearly increased stride to glean a spectrum of low-level details including head-switch and cylinder-switch times while factoring out rotational effects. A bandwidth benchmark extracts the zone profile of disks, revealing that the previously preferred linear model of zone bandwidth is less accurate than a quadratic model. A seek profile is also generated, completing a trio of benchmarks. Data is collected from a broad class of modern disks, including five SCSI, two IDE, and two simulated drives.