This is a very quick tutorial that shows you a quick and easy benchmark for your
hard drive.
Note that if you don't have hdparm installed already, you may want to think twice
about it, as it will disable DMA on your CD drives, unless you fix that yourself,
but that is beyond the scope of this tutoral.
Open a terminal and type in
su.
Now you are prompted for the root password. Enter it and then press
Enter.
Now type in
hdparm -t /dev/device, where "device" is whichever device you
are wanting to test, followed by
Enter. Usually, you can put
hda
to test your primary hard drive, and
fd0 to test your floppy drive.
Assuming you typed in
hdparm -tT /dev/hda, you should see output similar
to this:
/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.83 seconds =154.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.78 seconds = 35.96 MB/sec
The last bit is what you are concerned with. In the above example, my drive showed
a transfer rate of 35.96MB per second.
That's it. Type
exit so you are no longer root.
Enjoy!