Benchmarking disk wipes
Related articles
Benchmark different methods of disk wiping.
Contents
Frequently asked Questions
How do I wipe a disk?
See Securely wipe disk.
Are there other ways to benchmark a disk?
Of course. Take a look at Hdparm.
How do I get the HDD model with hdparm?
# hdparm -i /dev/sdX | grep Model
How do I check progress of dd while running?
See Core utilities#Checking progress of dd while running.
Benchmarking with dcfldd
Dcfldd doesn't print the average speed in MB/s like good old dd does but with time you can work around that.
Time the run clearing the disk:
# time dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M 18944 blocks (75776Mb) written.dcfldd:: No space left of device real 16m17.033s user 0m0.377s sys 0m51.160s
Calculate MB/s by dividing the output of the dcfldd command by the time in seconds. For this example: 75776Mb / (16.4 min * 60) = 77.0 MB/s.
Data
/dev/frandom
/dev/zero
Manufacture | Model | HDD Speed (RPM) | Interface | Capacity (GB) | Time (Hrs) | Throughput (MB/s) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hitachi | HTS725016A9A364 | 7200 | SATA2 | 160 | 0.72 | 63 |
Intel | SSDSA2M080G2GC | SSD | SATA2 | 80 | 0.27 | 77 |
Samsung | HD322HJ | 7200 | SATA2 | 320 | 1.15 | 74 |
Seagate | ST31000333AS | 7200 | SATA2 | 1000 | 2.92 | 90 |
Seagate | ST31500341AS | 7200 | SATA2 | 1500 | 4.13 | 96 |
Western Digital | WD20EARS | 5900 | SATA2 | 2000 | 5.91 | 94 |