Hey guys
I tried this test, and now my ext. HD is... disfunctional. any hints on my f*** up?
please note.. I am a newbie at ubuntu

Quote Originally Posted by danwood76 View Post
You can use DD to test disk speed, but it can easily lead to damaged data (partitions) if used incorrectly but is probably the most direct way of testing.

So for example my second internal disk is mount /media/HD2 so running this gives me the write speed:
Code:
dd count=1k bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/media/HD2/test.img
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 7.69365 s, 140 MB/s
that command writes 1GB to the disk, this large number is because the filesystem on the device will speed up the transfer by caching the data if a small transfer is carried out.

--edit--
This is a VERY dangerous command if you miss-type the output file so obviously take care using it and be sure to type correctly!