Linux Administration Cookbook

hdparm

It's possible that your disks are reporting back fine to your SMART commands, but you're still seeing some form of slowdown or other issues.

You can benchmark a disk's read with the hdparm tool (available in the default repositories).

We can test the speeds of our disk using the following:

$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

The manual page for hdparm suggests doing these tests two or three times for average results and running them on otherwise inactive systems.

Your mileage may vary, but the results from my system look like this:

/dev/sda: Timing cached reads:   13158 MB in  1.99 seconds = 6597.20 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2714 MB in  3.00 seconds = 903.83 MB/sec

Partly, we have a problem here, because what we're actually doing is reading ...