Na minha opinião, se você testar em uma máquina ociosa, o resultado é confiável. Eu usei este comando na minha estação de trabalho e funciona razoavelmente. Eu suspeito que o seu disco rígido / conexões tenha alguns problemas.
De acordo com o manual de hdparm
:
-t Perform timings of device reads for benchmark and comparison purposes. For meaningful results, this operation should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active
processes) with at least a couple of megabytes of free memory. This displays the speed of reading through the buffer cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. This measurement
is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads under Linux, without any filesystem overhead. To ensure accurate measurements, the buffer cache is flushed during
the processing of -t using the BLKFLSBUF ioctl.
-T Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison purposes. For meaningful results, this operation should be repeated 2-3 times on an otherwise inactive system (no other active
processes) with at least a couple of megabytes of free memory. This displays the speed of reading directly from the Linux buffer cache without disk access. This measurement is essentially
an indication of the throughput of the processor, cache, and memory of the system under test.