DISKINFO(8)

💽 DISKINFO(8) — get information about disk device 💽

okay so this is the diskinfo manual page from the System Manager's Manual, and it's literally here to help you get information about a disk device. bestie, it can also optionally run a naive performance test on the device, which is giving "let's poke the disk and see what happens" energy. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

diskinfo — get information about disk device.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

diskinfo [-ciStvw] disk ...
diskinfo [-l] -p disk ...
diskinfo [-l] -s disk ...

three whole modes, pick your fighter. 🫶

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

The diskinfo utility prints out information about a disk device, and optionally runs a naive performance test on the device. no cap, that's the whole vibe.

The following options are available:

• -c — perform a simple measurement of the I/O read command overhead. just a lil overhead check, very demure.
• -i — perform a simple IOPS benchmark. IOPS go brrr. 🔥
• -l — in case of -p or -s modes, prepend each line of an output with a device name using a tab character as a separator. yes, a literal tab character — respect the tab. 🎀
• -p — return the physical path of the disk. this is a string that identifies the physical path to the disk in the storage enclosure. very "where does this thing actually live" of it.
• -S — perform synchronous random write test (ZFS SLOG test), measuring time required to write data blocks of different size and flush disk cache. blocks of more then 128KB are written with multiple parallel operations. (yes, "more then" is exactly how it's written here — i don't make the rules. 🙈)
• -s — return the disk ident, usually the serial number. the disk's government name, basically.
• -t — perform a simple and rather naive benchmark of the disks seek and transfer performance. it's giving "naive benchmark" and honestly same.
• -v — print fields one per line with a descriptive comment. organized, annotated, iconic. ⭐
• -w — allow disruptive write tests. bestie, DISRUPTIVE. handle with care. 💀

If given no arguments, the output will be a single line per specified device with the following fields: device name, sectorsize, media size in bytes, media size in sectors, stripe size, stripe offset, firmware cylinders, firmware heads, and firmware sectors. the last three fields are only present if the information is available. slay, conditional fields. ✨

🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

List first ten (at most) da(4) devices with corresponding serial numbers:

diskinfo -ls /dev/da?

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

• da(4)

📜 HISTORY 📜

The diskinfo command appeared in FreeBSD 5.1. a classic, fr fr.

👑 AUTHORS 👑

The diskinfo utility was written by Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>. legend behavior. 🫶

💀 BUGS 💀

There are in order of increasing severity: lies, damn lies, statistics, and computer benchmarks. that's not me being shady, that's literally the bug note. 😭

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💖 okay that's the whole page! this one is from Debian, dated March 5, 2024 — mwah, go check those disks, bestie! 🎀