Comments on: HowTo: Linux Check IDE / SATA Hard Disk Transfer Speed

By: duckgrindrr

duckgrindrr — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:19:54 +0000

For anyone who might be wondering, the application in the two last screenshots is called palimpsest.

By: christian

christian — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:35:26 +0000

dd command: To get real write speed of your disk add conv=fdatasync to dd command. This will make dd not return before the output is physically written.

By: Hount

Hount — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:02:34 +0000

“sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i speed” does not show actual speeds which your hardware is capable. As it reports SATA and SATAII speeds even on my laptop which does not have a single SATA port.

By: dosn

dosn — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:57:06 +0000

Does this work on mounted disks?

By: mark seger

mark seger — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:08:02 +0000

you have to make sure you know what you’re monitoring. this tool looks like it’s measuring the transfer speed to the raw disk which doesn’t really have much value other than to verify your raw speeds are reasonable.

in reality, your disk has a file system and writing to a formatted disk will always be slowly, sometimes significantly slower depending on whether you’re reading/writing large sequential ones or small one. your blocksize can also make a dig differences. btw – if you’re doing random I/O expect a significant drop in numbers.

graphics are good to see, and I like them as well, but for simple benchmarking I like to see numbers and collectl makes that real easy to do. some like iostat but the output can be very difficult to read, especially if you’re taking samples every second which IS a good thing to do if you want to see exactly what’s going on.

-mark

By: My Name

My Name — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:45:16 +0000

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep “signaling speed”

returns something like this:
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)

By: M. Preston

M. Preston — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:09:40 +0000

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep SATA

returns nothing.

By: sanjay

sanjay — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:07:51 +0000

How to check the driver version is being used by SATA?

By: andrius

andrius — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:44:05 +0000

hdparm -tT /dev/md0

for raid

By: Markus Ewald

Markus Ewald — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:41:52 +0000

What about software RAID partitions?
I’d love to compare my RAID-5 versus a single drive!

By: adg

adg — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:57:42 +0000

Shri3772 ,
You probably won’t be able to install ‘linus’ on your hard drive.

By: santhanaraj.k

santhanaraj.k — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:19:14 +0000

how can i delete a partition througn a simple command

By: manolekshmi

manolekshmi — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:31:03 +0000

in serial ata,how fast datatrnsfer?how it is possible?what is the main difference between PATA & SATA.i want deatails about SATA harddisk communication to motherboard

By: Pablo

Pablo — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:27:21 +0000

Excellent, very useful tip. Thanks a lot!

By: nick

nick — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:22:16 +0000

Thanks for the tip, works great.

By: Shri3772

Shri3772 — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:13:49 +0000

help me in finding SATA Hard Drive Drivers for Linux

By: Shri3772

Shri3772 — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:12:33 +0000

I am trying to install linus n the machine having SATA Hard Drive .

Please let me know the URl or the site name where I will find these drivers

By: vivek

vivek — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:25:34 +0000

thanks for the heads up!

By: Jonas

Jonas — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:50:04 +0000

$ sudo hdparm /dev/sda (and following)

should be
$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

to get the output you show and describe (At least on most distros).