Software to test my LAN hard drive connection speed

I'd like to know the connection speeds of a couple of hard drives both connected to my Mac and on my LAN. Is there an app - gotta be for Mac - I can test the speed. I guess it will up and download a file to the drives and time it. As I tend to use large files - 25 to 30 Mb - something which reflects that, or lets me choose a file to use, would be wonderful.

Such a thing exist?

Just download the TBB test files from https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download say 1GB and 512 MB, then do a manual copy on your network and time it. Not 100% accurate but will probably be close enough.

Does a Mac have teh equivalent of Windows Task Manager? In Windows you can see the data rates on a network card. And in Win10 File Manager shows the rates too.

Turns out I can do it using rsync in the Terminal on a Mac. The command is

rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable path_to_source path_to_dest

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/32785/is-t...

I copied a 25Mb file:

1 file to consider
MyFile,dng
25.28M 100% 42.46MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)

Number of files: 1
Number of files transferred: 1
Total file size: 25.28M bytes
Total transferred file size: 25.28M bytes
Literal data: 25.28M bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 73
File list generation time: 0.004 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 25.28M
Total bytes received: 42

sent 25.28M bytes received 42 bytes 16.86M bytes/sec
total size is 25.28M speedup is 1.00

That's from a Mac to a NAS on a LAN. Fast or slow?

Mb or MB file?

I would always use a much larger file, say 250MB as any glitches/start-up are ironed out.

16.86 MB/sec >>> 135 Mb/sec. possibly a little slow, drives can often cope with up to 800 Mb/s and the LAN ,maybe 1 Gb

Ideally you want to test a larger file.
When transferring files to my network storage I can max out a gigabit ethernet connection at around 110-120MB/s

Thanks
Dan

In reply to a post by MHC:

Mb or MB file?

MB.

I see your point but I rarely transfer files much larger than 25 MB so I thought that a fair test.

I'll do another test when there's less traffic on the LAN, see if that increases the speed.

Try the GB file and see how long ...

The reason you want to use a larger file is to see if you can sustain the transfer speeds. Transferring a small file won't tell you this because it will copy really quickly unless something is wrong. Ideally whatever speed you're getting you should be able to sustain. If the transfer speed is dipping a lot and going up and down instead of levelling out and holding that speed consistently then that's not a good sign:

https://i.ibb.co/qRHBTQ6/vHB7aDb.png

iPerf is good for pure network testing but you do actually want to know your drive performance.

When I do these kind of transfer tests, I try to use a RAMdisk as source or destination, then the drive or network connection will be the limiting factors (rather than between 2 drives on 2 different computers for example where there are multiple factors).
Especially with increasing use of SSDs as copying to/from a spinning disk won't achieve the SSD throughput once any disk cache is exhausted.

RAMdisks have fallen out of fashion which is a shame because with many systems having 8/16GB they could easily spare 1GB, it's trivially easy on Linux and (for tmpfs) is automatically shunted to disk if free RAM running low.
I use one as my temporary download folder then archive anything I want to actually keep.

I did some tests.

I take folks point about hard drives, file sizes and so on. What I want to know is how much faster a fast drive on my desk - directly connected to my Mac - will be compared with a NAS in the basement.

The results may surprise you!

Or maybe not but I didn't get the result I was expecting.

I have a NAS on my LAN, connecting over 1G Ethernet and a RAID 5 box connected to my Mac via an eSATA to USB3 connector (I think). I'm copying from my Mac to the respective drive. I'm using the Think BroadBand test zip files, 1GB and 512 MB.

The NAS gives me 74.06M bytes/sec for the 1GB and 71.59M bytes/sec for the 512 MB

The RAID 5 was 42.11M bytes/sec for the 1GB and 42.95M bytes/sec for the 512 MB.

I was thinking of making more use of the RAID as I expected it to be quicker therefore better when working with large files on my Mac. Maybe I'll just keep it as a backup. In this case RAID is a backup!