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I want to calculate the average harddisk I/O.

Here i don't want to calculate the i/o currently performing on the system but also the capability of hard drive.

Thank you

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2 Answers

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Well there are lots of tools here ...

In order to know what io is happing on your system right now you could make use of iostat this will show you the total io per device, if you add a parameter (iostat 1) it will keep showing you the data each second.

vmstat (see the io columns) shows you aggregated io for the entire system.

In order to get an idea on the performance of a hard drive you could use hdparm -tT /dev/sda (replace /dev/sda by the device to test), this will perform timing of cache reads (-T) and timing of device reads (-t). This will should you the read performance of the device in general.

These are the 'polite' ways to get an idea of usage and throughput and allow you to do some comparisons

If you really want to stress things (e.g. simulate daemon behavior) you should take a look at more specialised benchmarking tools such as bonnie++ iozone and friends. Keep in mind that these will already focus on filesystem benchmarking as well and not only physical or os bound parameters.

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iostat is definently the way to go ! – Antoine Benkemoun Feb 16 '10 at 10:00
Thank You for your reply. iostat shows the no. of blocks read per second. I want to get the no. of I/O performed per second. – Muahmmad Zeeshan Feb 16 '10 at 13:57
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In addition to iostat and vmstat, dstat is very nice.

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When i execute dstat it returns command not found – Muahmmad Zeeshan Feb 16 '10 at 13:58
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which means you should install it, e.g. sudo apt-get install dstat on ubuntu-like distro's or installing the dstat package on other distro's – amo-ej1 Feb 16 '10 at 14:44
how do i install it on redhat – Muahmmad Zeeshan Feb 16 '10 at 15:04
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