Test the performance of your hard disk

To test the speed of your hard disk:

  1. Open Disks from the Activities overview.

  2. Choose the disk from the list in the left pane.

  3. Click the menu button and select Benchmark disk… from the menu.

  4. Click Start Benchmark… and adjust the Transfer Rate and Access Time parameters as desired.

  5. Click Start Benchmarking to test how fast data can be read from the disk. Administrative privileges may be required. Enter your password, or the password for the requested administrator account.

    If Perform write-benchmark is checked, the benchmark will test how fast data can be read from and written to the disk. This will take longer to complete.

When the test is finished, the results will appear on the graph. The green points and connecting lines indicate the samples taken; these correspond to the right axis, showing access time, plotted against the bottom axis, representing percentage time elapsed during the benchmark. The blue line represents read rates, while the red line represents write rates; these are shown as access data rates on the left axis, plotted against percentage of the disk traveled, from the outside to the spindle, along the bottom axis.

Below the graph, values are displayed for minimum, maximum and average read and write rates, average access time and time elapsed since the last benchmark test.