Check Disk Read/Write Speeds Using DD On Linux

Command line, Devops

Quick and dirty way to find the read/write speeds of your disk using the dd command

Ever been in a situation where you wanted to check the read write speeds of your disks?

I am sure you have heard of utilities like hdparam which does the same. But what if you just want a quick solution without installing anything?

Enter, the dd command. Its almost always present by default in a linux install. And here’s how you use it:

Write speed

sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync

Example:

$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.28696 s, 327 MB/s

Read speed

dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024

Note: This uses the tempfile created in the write test

Example:

$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 0.159273 s, 6.7 GB/s