cd /tmp
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=2048k of=tstfile count=8192 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, "MB/sec" }'
ls -al tstfile
time dd if=tstfile bs=2048k of=/dev/null count=8192 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, "MB/sec" }'
Note: If the machine has more than 16GB of free RAM, the read speed may be incorrect due to RAM caching.