Measure Hard disk performance in Ubuntu with Disk Utility and hdparm tools. Disk Management in Ubuntu has become easy with Palimpsest tool called Disk Utility. Apart from disk partition management, it does SMART tests to know the health of hard disk.SMART test shows HDD bad sectors.In this article I will show you two easy methods of doing Hard disk speed test,
Method 1: (Using Disk Utility)
This is a GUI(Graphical User Interface) method.
1. Goto System -> Administration -> Disk Utility.
2. Select your hard disk at left pane.
3. Now click “Benchmark – Measure Drive Performance” button in right pane.
4. A new window with charts opens.You will find and two buttons. One is for “Start Read Only Benchmark” and another one is “Start Read/Write Benchmark”. When you click on anyone button it starts benchmarking of hard disk.
5. The Chart will give detailed information about Maximum read rate and write rate, Average read & write rates. 😉
Method 2: (Using Terminal)
Now lets see how to check Hard disk speed rate using CUI(Command User Interface). hdparm is a nice tool to run on command line and Palimpsest is for GUI people.
1. Goto Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal.
2. Type the following,
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda
Note:
It will ask for password to carry out the testing process.
3. That’s it.Results will be displayed in screen 🙂
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Great pieces of info while I’m restoring an ‘old’ box from my Dad. Just one observation, which should be interpreted as taking NOTHING from your page-intent. Under “Method 2”, the way I’ve aways heard it referred to (in the USA at least, my experience being since 1996) is “CLI” = “Command Line Interface”. I just tried the GUI & got “disk too slow to benchmark”, – gonna try the hdparm -CLI- method now, hoping for more & better info. Thanks and keep up the good work Praveen!
I still find using ubuntu for checking fr errors to be cumbersome, i prefer, windows..
It doesn’t read or write all sectors, so its not suitable for whether there are no errors on disk
WOW! Went in for a benchmark, but foudn out that Disk utility has easy access to SMART data! Even in human-readable form. Thanks for pointing the direction! 🙂