Use Bonnie
How to use the disk benchmark tool bonnie
This is short HOWTO for running bonnie++. This is a burn-in and benchmarking application written in C++.
- Install the bonnie++ RPM (there is a spec in the dist tarball)
- Make a directory on a filesystem which resides on the device you want to test (ie /bench)
- Change the ownership and permissions on the test directory to a non-root user (ie chown bench:bench /bench; chmod 755 /bench)
- Run bonnie++ as a non-root user following the options given by the man page, (ie.
bonnie++ -d /bench -s 1000000 -x 5 -u bench:bench -q -f 2>&1 | tee bonnie++.LOG
(This has bonnie++ write to /bench, filling 1000000MB of disk space using approximately 1000x1GB files. This is done 5 times and is run as user/group products. It is also done "quietly" and only performs "fast" tests. The resulting stderr is copied to stdout which is piped to tee which displays on its stdout and writes to bonnie++.LOG.)
I also watch the progress of the tests by opening a second login session and running something like watch --differences df