wow EC2 instance free plan :
$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s
$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.8268 s, 30.0 MB/s
Note that on AWS your hard drive isn't on the machine running your VM. If you want to test local disk speed, do it in /mnt, where local disk storage is mounted... but remember that data stored there won't persist if you turn your instance off.