> I was mainly wanting to see a rough estimation of disk throughput
> (MB/sec).
try this in a state, where the machine is more or less idle
(you'd be able to setup a cronjob for this):
you will .5GB space for that ;-)
for i in 1 2 3 4 5
do
h_file="/a/clean/dir/on/your/disk/test_$i.data";
time dd if=/dev/zero of=$h_file bs=1m count=100;
time dd if=$h_file of=/dev/null bs=1m;
done;
don't forget to remove the files
dd will give you an avg bytes/sec on transfer, but
don't forget that these are with hw/os caching,
interferences with other active processes, and so on...
it's what you wanted: just rough estimation of how
fast your system will do basic disk io from userland.
this doesn't show how fast it could be, but will show
faster values than normal processing would deliver.
you could change the blocksize/count to increase/decrease
the work the system has to do for writing a specific amount
of data. the more the system has to work, the lesser the
blocksize and the lesser the throughput will be.
so "how fast is my disk" is always very depending on what
kind of action you do with it. transferring/working on
millions of small files will be much slower than working
on a few large files.
