Hdd benchmark

dd if=/dev/zero of=output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f output

Write speed

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./largefile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.82364 s, 223 MB/s
Block size is actually quite large. You can try with smaller sizes like 64k or even 4k.

Read speed

Run the following command to clear the memory cache

$ sudo sh -c "sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"

Now read the file which was created in write test:

$ dd if=./largefile of=/dev/null bs=4k
165118+0 records in
165118+0 records out
676323328 bytes (676 MB) copied, 3.0114 s, 225 MB/s