[SOLVED] Is there a program to measure the speed of a hard drive?
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While it is not a "speed test" program, if you are running Slackware (and most other distros) you will have smartctl installed or easily available which should be able to give you overall information about the health of your hard drive.
If slow speed results from drive r/w errors, as is almost always the case, that will show up in the self tests.
See man smartctl, as always.
It is also possible that your drive or some partition on the drive is nearly full which can also slow things.
Last edited by astrogeek; 06-26-2015 at 04:26 PM.
Reason: typos, additional thoughts
Sending command: "Execute SMART off-line routine immediately in off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART off-line routine immediately in off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 6780 seconds for test to complete.
Test will complete after Sat Jun 27 23:49:58 2014
I went to bed. The next day
Quote:
smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda'
returned
Quote:
No self-tests have been logged
There was no report displayed. The disk is 58% full. I also noticed no new process was spawned by running smartctl -t offline.
Hmmm... I ran . smartctl told me
I went to bed. The next day returned There was no report displayed. The disk is 58 full. I also noticed no new process was spawned by running smartctl -t offline.
Despite its name offline is a short foreground test of less than 2 minutes that all devices should support. The default self test makes no entry into the self test log. Most devices perform a default self test when they are being powered up.
And the smartctl man page for -t options:
Code:
offline - [ATA] runs SMART Immediate Offline Test. This immediately starts the test described
above. This command can be given during normal system operation. The effects of this test are
visible only in that it updates the SMART Attribute values, and if errors are found they will
appear in the SMART error log, visible with the -l error option.
So there is no visible report for an offline test. You might try the short or long options instead as they are logged and a little more clear.
I too, find the smartctl options and useage a little obscure at times.
Run the long selftest tonight when you go to bed and check the results in the morning.
Sending command: "Execute SMART off-line routine immediately in off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART off-line routine immediately in off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 6780 seconds for test to complete. Test will complete after Sat Jun 27 23:49:58 2014
Use 'hdparm -t /dev/sdx' to get raw transfer speed. The '-T' switch causes buffered (Linux Kernel Bufferring) read/write test which is not real raw device transfer speed.
And as previous post said 'dd' can be used too.
Code:
For read
dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/null bs=1M count=300
For write be careful!!! the device may be overwritten, so use a blank drive.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1M count=300
After 'dd' runs and stops it would show transfer statistics.
Thanks for the hdparm tip; I added running it and logging the output to rc.local; I'll build a record. It's short so can't test much of the disk, but smartctl's extensive search for errors turned nothing up. I have a program 'memtest' that boots into a RAM test. I'd like something like that for disk testing.
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