{"id":585,"date":"1997-09-09T01:36:29","date_gmt":"1997-09-09T09:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdhouse.org\/betips\/?p=585"},"modified":"1997-09-09T01:36:29","modified_gmt":"1997-09-09T09:36:29","slug":"test-disk-readwrite-speeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/?p=585","title":{"rendered":"Test disk read\/write speeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a number of ways to test the write and read speeds of your hard drive(s). One good test is to use the dd command in conjunction with \/dev\/zero to create a file of predetermined size, packed with zeroes. Run this through the „time“ command and you’ll get a fairly accurate reading of time and processor usage consumed. Try this:<\/p>\n

time dd if=\/dev\/zero of=temp.txt bs=1024k count=128<\/pre>\n
This will print the time it takes to write 128 MBs of data in 1 MB blocks to the file temp.txt. Doing this on my system gives:<\/p>\n
\n 128+0 records in\n 128+0 records out\n real    0m9.258s\n user    0m0.011s\n sys     0m1.472s\n<\/pre>\n
which indicates that it achieved a writing speed of 128\/9.258=13.8 megabytes per second. Since total CPU usage is user+sys, this shows CPU usage of (1.1472+0.011)\/9.258, or 12.5%.
\nBob Rost (rrost@andrew.cmu.edu) and Ramon Barrios Lascar (RamonBarrios@Virtualiza.com) show us how to use dd to test read speeds as well:
\nCreate a 128mb file „temp.dat“ on the Desktop, with this command:<\/p>\n
time dd if=\/dev\/zero of=\/boot\/home\/Desktop\/temp.dat bs=1024k count=128<\/pre>\n
Then use dd and direct it toward \/dev\/null<\/code> to test the pure read speed:<\/p>\n
\ntime dd if=\/boot\/home\/Desktop\/temp.dat of=\/dev\/null bs=1024k count=128\n128+0 records in\n128+0 records out\nreal    0m7.312s\nuser    0m0.004s\nsys     0m0.338s\n<\/pre>\n
Dividing 128 by 7.312 tells me that my hard drive can read 17.5 mb\/sec. Whoopee!
\nOther disk speed tests include iozone\/iostone from BeBits, and the disk benchmarking tools in BeRometer<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are a number of ways to test the write and read speeds of your hard drive(s). One good test is to use the dd command in conjunction with \/dev\/zero to create a file of predetermined size, packed with zeroes. Run this through the „time“ command and you’ll get a fairly accurate reading of time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betips.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}