Using dd to test and analyse read and write performance

According to Wikipedia, dd is a common UNIX program whose primary purpose is the low-level copying of raw data. There are many usage of dd, but for this blog we will use dd to test and analyse read and write performance of file system.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/myaccount/outfile bs=4M count=4096 

4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 433.088 seconds, 39.7 MB/s

if = input file
of = output
bs = block size
count = file size in kb