Test HDD performance

hdparm command

You can use the hdparm command to check hard disk speed. It provides a command line interface to various hard disk ioctls supported by the stock Linux ATA/IDE/SATA device driver subsystem. Login as the root and enter the following command:

[root@server2 ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

Sample outputs:

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   29084 MB in  2.00 seconds = 14574.71 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  308 MB in  3.01 seconds = 102.36 MB/sec
Note:
-t :perform device read timings
-T :perform cache read timings
/dev/sda : Hard disk device file

dd Command

You can use the dd command as follows to get speed info too:

[root@server2 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=8k count=256k
[root@server2 ~]# rm /tmp/test.img

Sample outputs:

dd: writing `/tmp/test.img': No space left on device
210779+0 records in
210778+0 records out
1726697472 bytes (1.7 GB) copied, 22.3398 seconds, 77.3 MB/s

Bonnie

Per effettuare dei benchmark sui dischi, è possibile utilizzare anche Bonnie++.