Linux Disk Benchmarking

A really quick way to see the write performance of your disk.....
Write a 512MB file


dd bs=1M count=512 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync ; rm test

And it tells you how fast it did it

512+0 records in

512+0 records out

536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 2.74433 s, 196 MB/s

The fdatasync option forces dd to do a sync to ensure data is really written to disk before it exits which should give a more realistic figure.