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The access speed of a disk drive attached to a Linux system can tested using the Linux ''hdparm'' utility. ''hdparm'' is supplied as standard with most linux distributions and essentially provides a command -line interface to the Linux disk device driver subsystem.
''hdparm'' supports a number of useful commandline command-line options, although a number of the options reconfigure drive settings and such options be used with great care (if at all). As far as testing the access speed of the device, however, the ''-T'' and ''-t'' flags are of particular interest.
The ''-T'' flag performs a speed test on the Linux buffer cache and does not access the physical sisk drive. This is essentially a performance test of the system processor, cache and memory.
