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Like me you might wonder from time to time how much data and how fast it is going through a pipe. For this purpose Pipe Viewer (pv) is a good program. There is packages for it in Ubuntu. It is unfortunately not installed by default.

It is quite simple to use. For instance if you want to see how fast you can read from your hard disk you simply type:sudo cat /dev/sda | pv > /dev/null

On my laptop I get this output: 76MB 0:00:09 [45,5MB/s] [ <=> ]

If you as me sometimes forget which motherboard or other hardware you have and don't want to reboot to detect it, then it can easily be seen with lshw:

sudo lshw | less