Check Disk Performance

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There are several ways to check disk performance in Linux, I would prefer to use these tools:

  • iostat
  • dd
  • hdparm

iostat

-x option to display extended statistics, including disk service time, average queue length, and disk utilization

1iostat -x

You can also specify how often you want the statistics to be updated and for how many times

1iostat 10 2

This will display the stats every 10 sec and will run 3 times.

dd

Check write speed:

1dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file.dat bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync

Check latency:

1dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file.dat bs=512 count=2000 oflag=dsync

hdparm

1sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/nvme1n2 
2
3/dev/nvme1n2:
4 Timing cached reads:   32450 MB in  2.00 seconds = 16249.12 MB/sec
5 Timing buffered disk reads: 4988 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1662.26 MB/sec

You can use the appropriate command depending on the information you want to gather and the type of storage you are working with.