Is there a way to show the speed of copying files on a Mac?

Solution 1:

If you're comfortable in the Terminal, you can use rsync to copy some files from one place to another and it'll give you summary stats on the speed:

rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable path_to_source path_to_dest

E.g. rsync --stats --human-readable ~/Desktop/Large-File /Volumes/OtherDisk/Dir

You can also type into the terminal just the command:

rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable 

(note there needs to be one or more spaces after --human-readable to end that command and break before the source and destination file names are provided)

Then drag the file / folder you wish to copy and drop it onto the terminal window, followed by dragging and dropping the destination directory. Dragging and dropping a file / folder onto a terminal window will place that file/folder's path into the terminal window. Dragging a file is preferred in most cases since it will handle a space in any folder or file name. In this case the space needs an \ to indicate not to end the file name exactly opposite of needing the space earlier.

The output of the above command will be similar to:

[jnet@Kyle ~]$ rsync -a --progress --stats --human-readable /Users/jnet/Pictures/Screen\ Caps /Volumes/Scratch 
building file list ... 
644 files to consider
Screen Caps/
Screen Caps/.DS_Store
      21.51K 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=642/644)
Screen Caps/Can someone downvote me please.pdf
      78.19K 100%    8.29MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=641/644)
Screen Caps/Can someone downvote me please.png
     399.61K 100%   14.66MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=640/644)
Screen Caps/ChefVMMemtest.png
       8.29K 100%  207.68kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#4, to-check=639/644)
[...]
Number of files: 644
Number of files transferred: 638
Total file size: 176.85M bytes
Total transferred file size: 176.85M bytes
Literal data: 176.85M bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 12574
File list generation time: 0.002 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 176.92M
Total bytes received: 14.09K

sent 176.92M bytes  received 14.09K bytes  14.15M bytes/sec
total size is 176.85M  speedup is 1.00

Solution 2:

The simplest method is to just tap into the overall IO speed measurements that the system maintains.

If you like the command line, diskutil list shows you what drives map to which disk0, disk1, etc... and iostat 1 will dump the transfer speeds each second. You will need to press Control-C to quit this program when done. Also, if you want a longer measurement just change the 1 to however many seconds you want to average the IO speeds.

If you like graphs, the "Activity Monitor" will aggregate the IO from all disks. Select the tab "Disk Activity", there a live graph of either the IO per second or Throughput (Data) per second over time for all drives combined.