Benchmark shared folder on Virtualbox?

Question

I'm trying to benchmark what I can read and write from the shared folder on my Virtualbox machine is?

From my local host machine I have a shared folder, and on the guest virtualized machine, I would like to know what it can read and write at.

The shared folder is mounted /media/sf_Foo as a vboxsf mount. (As per /proc/mounts)

I obviously can't run hdparm -tT on /media/sf_Foo since it's a directory, so how can I benchmark it?

Answer 1

My low-tech storage benchmark:

• For writes:

  dd if=/dev/urandom of=some.file bs=1M count=whatever

• For reads:

  dd if=some.file of=/dev/null

For things like shared folders, usage profile can be important, writing 1024x1MB files or one single 1GB file can yield very different results.