Blackmagic Forum

Hello,

I was curious if anyone had any experience with running Blackmagic Speed Test via the command line? I have a number of computers I would like to run Blackmagic Speed Test on, but need to set the Target Drive and the Stress Size on each machine, and have been finding it time consuming to launch the software on each computer and adjust accordingly.

I do see there are some command line arguments for Blackmagic Speed Test, per running

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/Applications/Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest -h

, but have been unsuccessful in figuring out the correct syntax to set the target drive and the stress size.

My attempts to set the target size have resulted in me trying

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/Applications/Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest -d /Users/Shared/SpeedTest/

, but regardless of my folder, including opening it with

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chmod -R 777 /Users/Shared/SpeedTest

(the folder exists on all computers), it's reported that the folder is read/only and cannot be used.

Does anyone have any experience using the command line for running Speed Test?

Thanks!

Any updates on this? Would be great to point to a customized location

I've not found an argument to address which volume to test.
But it appears as if there are no such argument via cl.

Options:
-h, --help Displays this help.
-c, --cmd Control via command-line options, not GUI.
-o, --outfile <file> Print result output to <file> (default: stdout).
-s, --size <size> Stress test of <size> GBs (default: 1).
-n, --iterations <N> <N> iterations (default: 1).

Was wondering if there's a cli tool that exists for the Windows version of Blackmagic Speed test? Ive tried running the Windows software version using the same options listed above and they do not work.

If someone who knows if it exists or not please help!

Hi folks, only three years late:

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from the command line (using '-c' as described above) runs the tests you define on the current directory.

So on a Mac, the simplest example might be:

$ cd /Volumes/myThunderboltDrive
$ /Applications/Blackmagic\ Disk\ Speed\ Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest -c

Result:

Write,1563.957031
Read,5207.723633

Sorted!

Wrong! I was looking at two similarly-spec'd drives and guessed the test was running in the current directory.

Nope.

It's actually writing to a path beneath /Users/<removed>/Library/Containers/com.blackmagic-design.DiskSpeedTest/, so I'll experiment with symbolic links and let you know if there's a simple way to get it to test other volumes. Should be do-able

Sad face, the nature of sandboxing in macOS means that the app's target directory can't be 'fooled' by symlinking to it within the app's container, or even by symlinking the entire container. macOS simply denies the write to the symlink-ed volume.

When Disk Speed Test is running in its GUI form, it co-operates with macOS to acquire permissions to write to an external volume when the (interactive) user makes that request.

So for Disk Speed Test to test other volumes on macOS from the command line securely, and obey the sandboxing rules like a good citizen, Blackmagicdesign would need to code that functionality within the app following the security and sandbox models.

<starts hunting through Blackmagicdesign site to find a feature request feature>

Facepalm time, I'm an idiot. The version of Disk Speed Test I've been investigating is the Mac App Store version, which of course has the sandboxed behaviour I've described.

The non-Mac App Store version I'm *now* investigating has just the switch we're looking for in the command-line:

$ /Applications/Blackmagic\ Disk\ Speed\ Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest -h
Usage: /Applications/Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest [options]

Options:
-h, --help Displays this help.
-c, --cmd Control via command-line options, not GUI.
-o, --outfile <file> Print result output to <file> (default: stdout).
-d, --dir <dir> Test target is <dir>.
-s, --size <size> Stress test of <size> GBs (default: 1).
-n, --iterations <N> <N> iterations (default: 1).

So on a Mac,

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/Applications/Blackmagic\ Disk\ Speed\ Test.app/Contents/MacOS/DiskSpeedTest -c -d /Volumes/big-old-usb-drive

will get a reliable speed benchmark for that big-old-usb-drive when it's mounted in the default location.

THANK YOU Blackmagicdesign for doing the work, and also to Ro in the EMEA Support team for confirming the situation.