Hard Drive Benchmark
CONVENTIONS USED

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!


© D. Olson 2001-2003 -- Originally found on The Mandrake eXPerience