Some of us will have multiple SD cards lying around. And sometimes it isn't obvious which one is the best to use.

Here is how you can check the speed of your SD cards which may help you with choosing the fastest one.

hdparm is a good tool to view disks reads, from the disk and from the buffer. We will use two options for hdparm;

1. The speed of reading directly from the Linux buffer cache without disk access. (-t option)
2. The speed of reading through the buffer cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. (-T option)

The first shows us an indication of the throughput of the processor, cache, and memory of the system under test. The second measures how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads, without any filesystem overhead. It is also best to run this command multiple times to see the affect of the caching.

Need to install hdparm, and then run it at least twice.
From my output below, you can see that the response for the cached reads increased the second time I ran hdparm.

DD can also be used to test SD card speeds.
WARNING: you must be careful using DD as incorrect options can erase your SD card.

This command will write a 200MB file called test to the SD Card;
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=200

This command will read the 200MB file created in the first command;
dd if=test of=/dev/null bs=1048576

Continue reading How to Test the SD Card Speed on Your Raspberry Pi →