Check hard drive speed on your VPS

Nowadays there are many many VPS providers out there. And many of them claim that they use pure SSD disk fields with their VPS’s but when you get into it you see that they are later claiming of using “SSD drives to speed up your VPS”.

This can be easily tested with a single line in your terminal.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testmydisk.img bs=512 count=1000 oflag=dsync

The command simply writes a 512 kB file repeatedly and measures the speed. If your provider is using an SSD drive you should see something similar to this:

1000+0 records in

1000+0 records out

512000 bytes (512 kB) copied, 1.41811 s, 500 kB/s

Whereas for a “regular” or let’s call them a normal hard disk, the time duration will be higher (approximately 10-30 seconds), of course the speed will be very slow as well.

After the test is done just delete the file:

rm /tmp/testmydisk.img