At 11:18 PM -0400 4/28/2010, iJohn wrote:
(Out of curiosity, is there a freeware (enough) tool for Mac's that
can be used to get a rough measure of the read (write?) speeds of a
drive? It's easy enough to get a ballpark guess figure these days with
Win 7 by just moving files and asking for "details". I don't know how
to guess at transfer speeds in OS X though ... except by copying a
file and measuring the time by watching the clock.)
You have a while Unix based operating system at your disposal! Use
the tools it provides!
In Terminal, use the dd command to throw data around. When finished,
it reports.
First, create a fairly large test file and put it on the device you
want to test.
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1048576 of=/Volumes/MyUSBstick/gigabyte.file
When finished, dd will report its performance. Since the data came
from the aether, there's no "read" time - this is pure write.
Now read that 1 GB file and throw the bits back into the aether.
dd if=/Volumes/MyUSBstick/gigabyte.file of=/dev/null
Note that it will take a little while for these commands to run,
seeing as they're flinging around a billion bytes. If you hit ^T
(control t), some intermediate status info will be shown.
You could use any large file to do the test. The first dd command
above is just an easy way to create a big one.
Of course, the test results will be more accurate if your i/o buses
are NOT busy doing other things. So be sure to quit your apps...
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
--
You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for
those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
