A quick and dirty benchmark to see how much I/O bandwidth your machine has is as follows. I created this because I just learned about pv, and I’m sure its been done before.
cat /dev/zero | pv > /dev/nullThis tests to see how fast the pipes system works on your specific machine by using the infinite zeros device and counting how many bytes it transfers per second to the null device. This does not actually write to your hard drive.
My results were as follows on my various machines.
- The linux lab server got a consistant 1.35GiB/s
- My dell precision m6500 got between 1.35GiB/s and 1.95GiB/s
- My friend got 2.5GiB/s on his macbook.
- My other friend got 1.5GiB/s on his eight year old dell.