New Official Raspberry Pi Diagnostics Tool, Agnostics, Launches with MicroSD Performance Test

Raspberry Pi users have a new tool for diagnosing issues with their setup, launching today with the ability to check the microSD card in use against the A1 performance standard: the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics, or agnostics.

"We've all heard the stories of people who have bought a large capacity SD card at a too-good-to-be-true price from a dodgy eBay seller, and found that their card labelled as 64GB can only actually hold 2GB of data," write software engineer Simon Long. "But that is at least fairly easy to spot — it’s much harder to work out whether your supposedly fast SD card is actually meeting its specified speed, and unscrupulous manufacturers and sellers often mislabel low quality cards as having unachievable speeds.

"Today, as the first part of a new suite of tests which will enable you to perform various diagnostics on your Raspberry Pi hardware, we are releasing a tool which allows you to test your SD card to check that it performs as it should."

This tool, the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics, is part of an effort in the Foundation to make it easier to diagnose faults and issues with both the Raspberry Pi and its accessories. In its initial public release, it offers detailed microSD card performance testing: While a test run is initially presented to the user with a simple pass/fail status, based on the SD Card A1 performance specification, a click on the "Show Log" button reveals more detailed results — sequential write, 4k random write, and 4k random read performance.

More information on the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics tool can be found on the official blog post, while it can be installed in Raspbian now with the following command at the Terminal:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install agnostics

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has not yet offered a roadmap to adding new tests into the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics tool.