How to benchmark your disks on Linux
Need to test the read and write speed of your hard drives or SSDs on Linux? With Kdiskmark, you can! In this guide, we’ll show you how to use Kdiskmark to measure the speeds of your drives.
Installing Kdiskmark
Kdiskmark is an excellent hard drive read/write testing tool for Linux. However, it must be installed on your computer before you can use it to test your disks. Thankfully, Kdiskwrite is available on most mainstream Linux distributions.
To install Kdiskmark on your Linux PC, start by opening up a terminal window. You can open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard. Or by searching for “Terminal” in the app menu and launching it that way.
With the terminal window open and ready to use, you can install the latest version of Kdiskmark on your Linux PC. Follow the installation instructions below that correspond with the Linux OS you use to get it installed.
Ubuntu — installation instructions
Sadly the Kdiskmark package isn’t available for Ubuntu users in the “universe” or “multiverse”; however, software repositories. To get Kdiskmark working on your computer, you can install the Kdiskmark tool from the Snap package store.
There is no need to enable the Snap runtime on Ubuntu, as Snap is enabled by default. To install Kdiskmark on Ubuntu, run the following snap install command.
sudo snap install kdiskmark
Debian — installation instructions
Those on Debian cannot install Kdiskmark using the Apt-get install command, as Kdiskmark isn’t available in the “Main” software repository. However, the Kdiskmark application is available as a Flatpak, and you can install it using the flatpak commands.
Before you use the flatpak install command, you must set up the Flatpak runtime how your computer. How do you set it up? Follow our in-depth guide on Flatpak to get the runtime configured on Linux.
Once the Flatpak runtime is working, you can install the latest version of Kdiskmark on your Debian Linux system using flatpak install.
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub io.github.jonmagon.kdiskmark
Arch Linux — installation instructions
The Kdiskmark application is available for all Arch Linux users in the “Community” First, ensure the repository. Next, ensure that this software repository is enabled in your /etc/pacman.conf file. Then, use the following pacman -S command to get the latest version of Kdiskmark working on Arch Linux.
sudo pacman -S kdiskmark
Fedora — installation instructions
For those that use Fedora 35 or 36, it is possible to get Kdiskmark installed. To get it set up, use the following dnf install command below.
sudo dnf install kdiskmark
OpenSUSE — installation instructions
On OpenSUSE Linux, it is possible to get Kdiskmark working — if you use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. To install it on Tumbleweed, use the following zypper install command.
sudo zypper install kdiskmark
If you’re on OpenSUSE Leap, follow the Debian Flatpak instructions instead.
How to test your disk read/write speed with Kdiskmark
Follow the steps below to test the read/write speed rate in Kdiskmark.
- Open up the Kdiskmark application by searching for “Kdiskmark” in the app menu. Once it is open, find the “Profile” menu, and select it with those.
- Look inside of the “Profile” menu, and choose a testing type. Out of the box, the “Default” option is selected. However, the other options are “Peak Performance,” “Real World Performance,” “Demo,” and others. Select the “Real World Performance” option.
- You must now select the disk you wish to test. Unfortunately, you test disks that are mounted to a file system. Find your drive in the drop-down menu. If you want to test a drive that isn’t in Kdiskmark, open up the Linux file manager, mount your disk, and click the refresh button in the app to select your drive.
- Upon selecting your drive in Kdiskmark, select the “All” button. Clicking on this button will run a disk test to benchmark the read and write speed of the hard drive. It will take quite a while to finish the process, so be patient.
- When the benchmark process is complete, you will see your read/write information shown in Kdiskmark. To export this data to a file for your records, select the “File” button, then click on the “Save” option. Selecting this option will export the benchmark data as a TXT file.
Other Kdiskmark benchmark settings
Kdiskmark has a lot of different settings for benchmarking. So first, select the “Settings” menu in the Kdiskmark app to access these settings. Once you’ve selected this button, you’ll be able to choose from options like “Standard” (for standard SATA drives,) “NVMe SSD,” and much more.
While the default settings should do fine for most users, and settings don’t need to be changed. That said, accessing these extra settings is a must if you want to customize how Kdiskmark tests your disks.
