Changes

The access speed of a disk drive attached to a Linux system can be 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 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 disk drive. This is essentially a performance test of the system processor, cache and memory.