Ryan Burnette August 26, 2020

Testing Disk Speed in Linux

Here’s the guide I use for testing disk speeds in Linux. I’m usually testing speeds on my ZFS pools.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-linux-unix-test-disk-performance-with-dd-command/

Examples

Here’s the performance on my FreeNAS. The host hardware is a Proxmox hypervisor:

Dell PowerEdge R720xd
2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 v2
64GiB ECC RAM
6x Western Digital WD Red Pro Hard Drives

The FreeNAS installation itself is virtualized with my IT mode flashed H710 HBA running in the guest as a passthrough device.

root@freenas[/mnt/red]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1G count=5 status=progress
  5368709120 bytes (5369 MB, 5120 MiB) transferred 7.494s, 716 MB/s
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
5368709120 bytes transferred in 7.493742 secs (716425679 bytes/sec)

I’m very happy with the Western Digital WD Red Pro. Just watch out to make sure you don’t buy any SMR drives.

Categories:

DevOps