To keep an eye on the performance of your dedicated server at IP-Projects, you can optionally run a hard disk benchmark after provisioning the server. Two tools are suitable for this under Debian / Ubuntu, which we will discuss in more detail in the tutorial:
- hdparm
- dd
Install the necessary tools
The tool dd is already implemented in Linux. The software hdparm must be installed in most cases first with the command
apt-get install hdparm
installiert werden.
Hard disk benchmark
hdparm
hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
Here the return value could look something like this:
/dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 7036 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3518.91 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 540 MB in 3.00 seconds = 179.94 MB/sec
The information Timing cached reads is mostly misleading. Many hard disks have an internal read cache, which misleadingly corrects this value extremely upwards. You should therefore only use the Timing buffered disk reads value.
As an alternative to hdparm, you can perform more comprehensive hard disk benchmarks with dd.
dd
Time it takes the hard disk to write a 10 GB file:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=datei bs=1M count=10240
Time needed by the hard disks to read the 10 GB file:
time dd if=datei of=/dev/null
Time to write a 10 GB file to the cache. To bypass the cache:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=datei bs=1M count=10240 oflag=direct
Depending on the hard disk type, values between 80 and 150 MB/s should appear for normal hard disks. With SSD hard disks between 200 - 500 MB/s, depending on SSD generation and SATA port.