MAC View file transfer speeds while copying

Often while copying large files from external hard disks, you want to see the transfer rates. MAC natively doesn’t show the transfer speed. However there’s a workaround:

1) open Terminal and write:

[code lang=”bash” light=”true”]
while true ; do iostat -w 2 ; done
[/code]

This will show real-time data transfer speed of all mounted disks. Like:
[code lang=”bash” light=”true”]
$ while true ; do iostat -w 2 ; done
disk0 disk1 cpu load average
KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us sy id 1m 5m 15m
71.23 134 9.35 44.69 45 1.96 21 22 58 1.61 1.94 1.90
70.61 237 16.33 66.18 169 10.95 8 30 63 1.48 1.91 1.88
77.30 109 8.22 16.09 605 9.50 8 33 59 1.48 1.91 1.88
385.81 20 7.53 21.54 449 9.44 8 28 64 1.44 1.89 1.88
243.28 17 4.04 14.09 319 4.39 7 26 67 1.44 1.89 1.88
[/code]

2 Replies to “MAC View file transfer speeds while copying”

  1. thanks for the -w tip

    and in return 🙂
    you can remove the while loop as the final digit passed to iostat is a repeat interval e.g. to repeat every second:

    iostat -w2 1

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