ioping

ioping is probably the easiest tool to investigate and obtain the latency and speed of storage devices. It is inspired by the class ping networking tool and offers a similar output at the shell.

• Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install ioping

• To use it provide a file, directory or device:

$ ioping /home/joe/somefile
$ ioping /home/joe
$ sudo ioping /dev/sda1

If a file is specified, make sure the file exists and its filesize is greater or equal to the request size (default is 4KiB). If a device or partition is specified, you might need to provide root privileges.

Here is a sample output on a directory:

$ ioping /home/joe
4 KiB <<< /home/joe (ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2): request=1 time=512.8 us (warmup)
4 KiB <<< /home/joe (ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2): request=2 time=2.74 ms
4 KiB <<< /home/joe (ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2): request=3 time=2.73 ms
4 KiB <<< /home/joe (ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2): request=4 time=2.74 ms
^C
--- /home/joe (ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2) ioping statistics ---
3 requests completed in 8.22 ms, 12 KiB read, 365 iops, 1.43 MiB/s
generated 4 requests in 3.56 s, 16 KiB, 1 iops, 4.49 KiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 2.73 ms / 2.74 ms / 2.74 ms / 6.21 us

Note that the tool prints stats for read operations by default. From the above output, we can see the device/partition that is being tested (/dev/mmcblk0p2) and its filesystem (ext4). There was 1 warmup request and 3 test requests before the program was stopped using Ctrl+C. The requests are each of size 4 KiB which can be deduced from the total 12 KiB read in the output. The speed for requests of 4 KiB seems to be 1.43 MiB/s. Finally, the average latency for this device seems to be 2.74 ms.

• To try a different request size (default is 4 KiB):

$ ioping -s 4M /home/joe

• Instead of the default read requests, if we wish to try write requests:

$ ioping -W /home/joe

• To alternate read and write requests:

$ ioping -G /home/joe

Tried with: ioping 1.1 and Ubuntu 20.04