Hard drive read speed

Is copying to /dev/null a correct way to determine hard drive’s read speed:

time cp large_file /dev/null

?

Hi
Use hdparm, eg;


hdparm -T /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   6348 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3174.66 MB/sec

If you want to do benchmarking, use iozone, I have the latest packaged
up in my Misc repo;
http://software.opensuse.org/package/iozone?search_term=iozone


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 3.0.34-0.7-default
up 1 day 15:55, 5 users, load average: 0.18, 0.27, 0.33
CPU Intel i5 CPU M520@2.40GHz | Intel Arrandale GPU

On 07/11/2012 12:24 PM, malcolmlewis wrote:
>

> Hi
> Use hdparm, eg;
>


> hdparm -T /dev/sda
>
> /dev/sda:
>   Timing cached reads:   6348 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3174.66 MB/sec
> 

> If you want to do benchmarking, use iozone, I have the latest packaged
> up in my Misc repo;
> openSUSE Software
>

hdparm is a poor man’s speed check… you want -t (little T)

Big T will give you caching info (will make your storage seem lightning fast…
and similar to some Windows benchmark tools I’ve seen)

Iozone, while more complete, will take hours to run on today’s large drivers.

If you want something that will likely show the exact same number as IOzone, but
faster to run… .use bonnie++