Thank you for your comment. :)

I just figured I could use tune2fs in combination with some other piped commands in order to get the block size from the device. Then I'll just assume that one write is one block equal to the block size of the device. I guess I'm thinking correct, yes? (block devices are really not my strong side)

And another thing. I decided to try out Perlmonks' forum because of the good reputation I discovered this site had when doing some Google-ing after some good Perl forums.

As to the discussion above where bad-mouthing and smart-assing towards my question as it seems to be ridiculous by another user I can just say that I barely came back to this forum because of that.

But anyhow, I am fairly capable of programming in Perl, though my question seemed non-Perl-ish by the content of the post.

I still hope someone has some tricks up their sleeves when it comes to handling the /proc/diskstats file when it comes to calculating different statistics from the data within that file.

Take a look at the source for Sys::Statistics::Linux::DiskStats. It includes comments like:

        # ------------------------------------------------------------
+--
        # The sectors are equivalent with blocks and have a size of 51
+2
        # bytes since 2.4 kernels. This value is needed to calculate t
+he
        # amount of disk i/o's in bytes.
        # ------------------------------------------------------------
+--
        blocksize => 512,
[download]

Reading the code and seeing how the module's author calculates values should be helpful.

Thanks for coming back and sharing the progress you've made. There are some great people here. Take a look around the site when you have some time. Read sections like PerlMonks FAQ, Selected Best Nodes and check out some of the members' home nodes. Keep posting. :)