Here's one way. This command measures how long is takes to read 1500K of data from CD:

% time -p dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=1k count=1500
1500+0 records in
1500+0 records out
real 5.24
user 0.03
sys 5.07

The transfer rate of single speed drives is 150 kilobytes per second, which should take about 10 seconds. At double speed it would take five seconds, quad speed would take 2.5, etc.

The "real" time above is probably the best number to look at — in this case it indicates a double speed drive. You can increase the amount of data transferred to get a more accurate value (the data does not get cached). You should probably run the command a few times and take the average.

There is a small utility called volname included with recent versions of the eject program. Alternatively you can run this shell command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=1 skip=32808 count=32

assuming /dev/cdrom is the device file name for your drive.

documented on: 2005.07.22