Is one of the main components of any modern computer. Now they are beginning to be replaced, but in many cases there is practically no alternative to hard drives.
After purchasing and installing a new hard drive, many users are interested in its speed. Now we will talk about how to check the speed of a hard drive using special programs.
The first program we will look at is HD Tune. With this program you can test the speed of your hard drive.
HD Tune comes in two versions: the free version of HD Tune and the paid version of HD Tune Pro. HD Tune Pro can run 15 days without registration, so you can.
With HD Tune, you can check the read and write speed of your hard drive. To do this, run the program, and on the “Benchmark” tab select one of the “Read” or “Write” testing modes. If your computer has multiple hard drives, be sure to select the one you want to check. After that you need to start using the "Start" button.
After completing the hard disk check, the program will display the results. The data will be shown in digital and graphical representation.
Let's consider the main indicators that can be obtained when checking the speed of a hard disk using this program:
- Minimum is the lowest data transfer rate that the hard drive showed during the entire test (MB / sec).
- Maximum is the highest data transfer rate that the hard drive showed during the entire test (MB / sec). This value is most often indicated by disc manufacturers. But, the maximum speed is by far the most important indicator. It should also be noted that the minimum and maximum data transfer rates can differ significantly, but this does not always indicate technical problems.
- Rate Average is the average data transfer rate shown by this hard disk during the entire test (MB / sec). This indicator is already more useful, but it cannot be taken into account in isolation from the rest of the data.
- Access Time is the time to access files on disk (ms). In theory, the lower the file access time, the better.
- Burst Rate is the peak data transfer rate. This value is also often given as the real speed of the hard disk, but it is not always possible to achieve it in real conditions.
- CPU Usage - this parameter displays the CPU usage (%) during testing.
CrystalDiskMark is another fairly popular hard drive speed testing program. It has fewer features than HD Tune and its interface is much simpler, but it does its job well.
In order to check the speed of your hard drive using the CrystalDiskMark program and install it on your computer. After starting the program, you must select the disk partition that will be used to check the speed, as well as the check mode. To start the scan, click on the "All" button.
After the end of the process, the program will display the results. In order to save the result of the disk check, you can take a screenshot of the program or use the "Edit - Copy the test result" menu, in this case you will receive a text report.
With active use of the PC, you probably often felt noticeable jams and freezes in those moments when substantial amounts of data were written to the hard disk cache, or when you performed a save during the game. The reason for this is the insufficiently high speed of the internal storage. As you know, the hard drive is the most vulnerable component in the hardware configuration of a PC, and no matter how powerful the architecture of your PC is, even if you installed a processor and a video card of the latest generation, if the hard drive is slow - stable games with a high FPS and a high opening speed Web pages in a browser, as well as work in a text or spreadsheet editor, you will not see. Today I will talk about how to check the speed of a disk, how to make sure that your drive is fast enough to handle all the load assigned to it, and also how to compare it to an SSD drive that you may have borrowed from friends for a couple of days. use and test. After completing the check described below, you can make sure whether the hard drive is the weakest link in your system, and whether you need to replace it with a more productive and powerful one (fortunately, their price has reached quite acceptable sizes today, and in terms of speed they are clearly ahead of HDD drives ). We devoted the topic of basic comparison of HDD and SSD disks, in the same article we will check all the speed characteristics of our "workhorse", and find out how much they are ahead (or lagging behind) from each other.
To test the speed and performance of hard drives, you can find a lot of software that compares the speed of reading and writing data for different block sizes installed on the drive, as well as the queue depth. Writing / reading can be random and sequential - different types are needed for disks of different sizes and, accordingly, blocks. Sequential recording will be relevant if the block size is 1024 KB and above. At smaller sizes, it is absolutely appropriate to write randomly. In the same review I will focus on two system utilities that cope with the task literally "with a bang" with all the information content and clarity - CrystalDiskMark and HD Tune.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is the most respected and demanded program both in overclocking circles and among ordinary technical enthusiasts who are engaged in detailed configuration of the hardware base of their PCs, who want to get the most reliable and objective information about their drive.
Installation of the software is quick and painless. How to check disk speed with CrystalDiskMark?
The basic shape of the instrument is pretty pretty and unsightly. First, we set the language to "Russian" so that in the future there are no problems with access to the menu.
There are 4 different performance tests available on the main form:
Seq Q32T1 - sequential read / write with 32 queue depth and one pass
4K Q32T1 - Random Read / Write with 4KB Block Size, 32 Queue Depth and One Pass
Seq - sequential read / write. Typically, this is the test that reviewers and technicians who test hardware professionals use
4K - Random read / write with a block size of 4 KB and a queue depth of 1.
What is meant here by letter abbreviations? Q32T1 is the number of passes and the queue depth (can be set in the parameters). In turn, 4K is the size of the tested block, it can take other values \u200b\u200b(depending on parameters, application version, etc.)
The upper button "All" initiates an immediate start of the check of all tests in sequence.
The Read and Write columns are responsible for reading and writing measured data from the hard disk, respectively. Above, we see a pull-down menu bar (5, 1 Gib, C: \\) providing additional information about the following options below:
The first item is the number of checks (default 5). Determines the number of repetitions of measurements, according to the results of which the average value is displayed on the screen. It should be noted that this parameter has a significant effect on the objectivity of measurements, but at the same time it takes a lot of time for measurements.
File size (1 Gib by default). Determines the size of the file used for reading and writing measurements.
Disk (C: 47% (63 / 133Gib) - provides the ability to select a test disk (if your hard drive is split into several logical devices).
The queue depth and the number of passes can be changed in the options menu. To do this, go to the "Settings" item of the main menu and select the "Queue and flows" option here.
As a result, you will be taken to a form where you can change the specified values.
For an ordinary user, the parameters set by default will be enough, and the number of passes should be left at 3-5 times.
Important note: the check disk, for the sake of obtaining the most objective results, must not be completely filled, and the amount of unallocated space must be at least 15-20%. In particular, the developers recommend disabling all active applications during testing, in particular, this has to do with torrents and other utilities that are demanding on system resources.
To run a test, click on one of the green buttons on the left, or on the topmost one, to run all tests. Read and write indicators will be informatively displayed in the corresponding fields.
What are the obtained values \u200b\u200bthat interest us the most? The most interesting are the first and last lines, which are responsible for the results of testing read and write operations of 4K blocks. The reason for this is the following: in normal daily use of a PC, it is quite rare when working with a disk that sequential reading and writing of information is involved. More often, random sectors are processed (approximately 80% of all operations). Therefore, you should not believe the often overestimated numbers indicated by marketers in brochures and advertising notes.
There are very few additional options here, perhaps I have already described most of them. As you can see, the utility is incredibly simple, but it works efficiently, does not make you wait long for the verification operation to complete, and provides a detailed answer to the question: "How to check the disk speed?"
HD Tune
Although there is a paid and available version of the product (HD Tune Pro) on the official website, we will focus on its free version, which can be downloaded from the download page. So how to check disk speed with HD Tune system utility? Let's figure it out.
The application works in a slightly different way compared to CrystalDiskMark. After installing the program on the hard drive, launch the application and see the main window. There are four tabs available here: Benchmark, Info, Health and Error Scan. If you turn to the Info and Health tabs, you can get detailed information about the modes supported by the hard disk and the presence of bad clusters in its structure, respectively. The Error Scan tab will scan the entire structure of the disk drive for operability and reliability, immediately highlighting for you information about possible errors and bad cells, if any. This check is almost identical to the drive health check mechanism built into the operating system, so you won't find anything new here.
We are most interested in the “Benchmark” tab, because it is with its help that we will find out how fast our hard drive is and will be able to compare it with the indicators of the installed hardware SSD-drive, that is, to conduct a full-fledged disk speed test.
Now it's time to translate the scales into Russian, so that during the check you do not get confused about which is which:
Transfer Rate (Minimum) - indicator of the minimum speed of the disk drive, obtained as a result of the check (Mb / s)
Transfer Rate (Maximum) - indicator of the maximum speed of the disk drive, obtained as a result of the test (Mb / s)
Transfer Rate (Average) - indicator of the average speed of the disk drive, obtained as a result of the test (Mb / s)
Access Time - the time spent on accessing file objects (the lower the indicator, the better) (millisec)
Burst Rate - interface peak speed, i.e. limit (Mb / sec)
CPU Usage - percentage of used processor resources (%).
Go to the "Benchmark" tab and press the "Start" button to initialize and start the testing procedure, after selecting the required disk from the list of available ones. It is important to understand that during testing, you should disable the most active software products that consume processor resources: antiviruses, firewalls, torrents, browser downloads.
The verification process has now begun. If the system receives a load, the data on the graph will change synchronously and show the actual information. When enough time has passed (say, 5-10 minutes), the routine will be interrupted, and we can visually examine the information received. You do not need to stop the process manually, everything will happen automatically.
What data will we get from the graph to determine how to find out the disk speed? First of all, the minimum, maximum and average data transfer rates. These readings are comparable to those obtained in CrystalDiskMark. Further, yellow dots indicate disk access times. Since the program addresses various logical devices and tracks on the disk, the point readings are set in an arbitrary way, informing us about the spread of points across the drive structure.
For starters, there is the burst rate and the percentage of the processor load during data transfer. Next, let's check the readings against the SSD by selecting it from the appropriate list at the top of the form and re-running the testing routine.
On the software market, you can also find products such as HD Speed \u200b\u200band FC Test, but in terms of their functionality they are significantly inferior to the tools we have described above.
Now you know how to check disk speed using one of our proposed software products. Using this method, you can tell for sure whether your computer needs a disk device upgrade, whether it has sufficient requirements to get rid of the played role of the drive as a bottleneck (say, whether it has a SATA 3.0 bus and support for SMART technology), and guarantees is it an increase in the speed of your workhorse.
In the last article on the site, we considered a utility that informs about all the data on a computer's hard drive. In this article, we will get acquainted with a related utility (the programs have the same developer) - CrystalDiskMark... It is designed to measure the performance of hard drives.
1. About CrystalDiskMark
Windows program CrystalDiskMark knows how to measure the average speed of reading and writing data from conventional hard drives with magnetic platters, both external and connected via USB, SSD-drives and flash drives. Unlike many analog programs, CrystalDiskMark allows you to determine the read and write speed on individual disk partitions.
CrystalDiskMark is a free, multilingual program that has no other functionality except for testing the performance of hard drives.
You can download CrystalDiskMark on the developer's website. The program is presented in a regular version that requires installation and a portable version. CrystalDiskMark Shizuku Editions are Japanese anime-style versions of the program.
If CrystalDiskMark is selected in the usual version, which requires installation, you must carefully monitor the installation process so that you do not install unnecessary software in the system along the way.
2. Testing hard drives
After starting the program, we will see its small window in the form of a table of values. The extreme cell of the line at the top provides for the selection of a specific disk partition or connected device (flash drive, USB-HDD, USB-SSD).
The cells to the left are the cycles of reading and writing a reference file with a certain size, which the program will temporarily place on the tested disk partition or device. The number of cycles of 5 with a file size of 1000 MB, set in the program by default, can be left for ordinary hard drives HDD.
In order not to expose the SSD drive to wear and tear, in the case of testing it, it is recommended to reduce the number of cycles to 3 for a file size of 100 MB.
Select the partition to be tested or a connected USB device and start the process of measuring the speed of reading and writing data by pressing the button “ All».
« All"- as you can see from the name, this is the launch of all the tests of reading and writing data presented below. They can also be launched individually with the corresponding button:
- « Seq»- testing of sequential data reading and writing is started;
- « 512K»- testing of random reading and writing of 512 Kb blocks is started;
- « 4K»- testing of random reading and writing of blocks with a size of 4 KB with a queue depth of 1 is started;
- « 4K QD32"- testing of random reading and writing of blocks with a size of 4 KB with a queue depth of 32 is started.
Of all these individual tests, by and large, only “ Seq". It is the sequential measurement of reading and writing data that is considered an indicative parameter, since it is its values \u200b\u200bthat manufacturers indicate in the characteristics of information carriers. And if the purpose of measuring the performance of a new hard disk or flash drive is to check the manufacturer or seller, whether he has lied, promising better performance, you can run only testing " Seq».
After a short test in the CrystalDiskMark table, we will see the average speed of the hard disk - in the cells of the column “ Read"The speed of reading data, and in the cells of the column" Write", Respectively, the speed of their recording.
3. Other functionality of the program
CrystalDiskMark allows you to copy test results to text format. The test data saved in a text file can be used later for analysis and comparison.
The CrystalDiskMark program provides the ability to increase the scale of its window, as well as change the color of the interface.
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Hi admin! Decided to buy a solid-state drive the other day! I came to a computer store and told the seller:
Sell \u200b\u200bme the fastest SSD!
and they answered me:
Here you go, Kingston HyperX 3K (120GB, SATA-III) 555MB / s, superb SSD, it never gets faster.
Prove it!
Apparently they wanted so much to sell me this SSD that they installed it on their computer and ran the test in the CrystalDiskMark program, then showed the test result, here's a screenshot:
541 MB / s sequential read and 493 MB / s write, I even took a picture of it on my phone.
In short, I bought this SSD, came home, connected it to my computer, then downloaded and launched the "CrystalDiskMark" program and ran the same test, but the result was worse!
489 MB / s sequential read and 127 MB / s write. Why?
In the store, the test was performed on a computer with an Intel® Core ™ i5 processor and 4GB memory, while my computer is more powerful and is based on an Intel® Core ™ i7 processor and has 8GB memory.
Explain to the admin what the catch is, otherwise I won't sleep, after all, this SSD costs 3 and a half rubles.
Hello everybody! Yes, this can be friends, you just need to be able to use the CrystalDiskMark program. Now I will show you everything.
- Note: You may be interested in our other articles about SSD solid state drives
SSD test will be carried out in CrystalDiskMark 3 0 3
The program can be downloaded from the official website http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html
CrystalDiskMark tests our SSD this way:
All: All 4 tests are performed (Seq, 512K, 4K, 4K QD32);
Seq: Test sequential write / read (block size \u003d 1024Kb);
512K: Random write / read test (block size \u003d 512Kb);
4K: Random write / read test (block size \u003d 4Kb);
4K QD32: Random write / read test (block size \u003d 4Kb, queue depth \u003d 32) for NCQ and AHCI;
The final result.
First, properly test your SSD or any other hard drive! The fastest SSD will read and write information to a section filled with zeros. To do this, in CrystalDiskMark in the file menu, select File-\u003e Test Data-\u003e All 0x0000 (Fill).
I also own this Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (120GB SATA-III) and will now do a simple test.
In the operating system, the SSD drive is under the letter D :, which means in the program settings, select the letter D: and click
The sequential read and write speed test of our solid state drive begins!
In a minute we get the result. Sequential Read / Write 543MB / s Read, 507MB / s Write
Now we carry out the test differently. File-\u003e Test Data-\u003e Default (Random)
In a minute we get the result not at all the same as when testing with the option All 0x0000 (Fill). 499MB / s sequential read / write read, 149MB / s write
It is also important for the SSD to work well to connect it to your motherboard correctly. All SSDs have a high speed SATA 3.0 (6Gb / s) interface and your motherboard will probably have these connectors. For example, my ASUS P8Z77-V PRO motherboard has four SATA 6 Gb / s ports and they are appropriately marked SATA 6G, so we connect the SSD according to the marking.
Use the native SATA 6Gb / s data cable to connect a SATA 6Gb / s SSD!
Among ordinary users who do not belong to the segment of enthusiastic assemblers or simply interested in PC technology, there is an opinion that the speed of a computer primarily depends on the frequency of the processor and the amount of RAM. This is partly true, but many often underestimate another very important component of a modern computer - the disk for user data and the operating system. The speed of your computer as a whole depends on how fast your PC's file storage system works. That is why users who want to pump the performance of a computer are advised to buy an SSD first, since it works much faster than conventional hard drives.
There are many reasons to check the speed of a disk. From banal curiosity to diagnosing a performance drawdown or comparing the speeds declared by the manufacturer with the real ones. Checking disk speed in Windows 10 will also help you figure out if you should replace the disk with another one to improve performance.
Unfortunately, Windows 10 does not have built-in mechanisms for measuring disk speed, and therefore we will use third-party applications to complete this task.
CrystalDisk Mark - Hard Disk Speed \u200b\u200bTest
One of the most popular utilities for checking disk speed in Windows 10. Simple, free, convenient, and also Russified. In addition, it can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store, which will further simplify the task for the user.
For reference: the version from the store is no different from the version on the official website. It's all about ease of installation.
Disk speed test in AS SSD Benchmark
It is quite possible that you will see figures lower than those declared by the manufacturer of your disk (this primarily concerns the SSD). In this case, we advise you to check the interface for connecting the SSD to the computer. To "unleash the potential" of a conventional 2.5 "drive, use a SATA3 connection. It provides speeds up to 600 Mb / s. SATA3 drives can be connected to SATA and SATA2 interfaces, but in this case their maximum speed will not exceed 150 and 300 Mb / s. The highest values \u200b\u200bwill show drives in RAID configuration or with PCIe interface. If, while checking the hard disk, you notice very low speed readings, it may be that there are some bad sectors on the disk. In this case, we recommend you. This will help you decide if it is worth changing your PC's storage system, or if your existing drives may still work for a while.
You can check the type of interface on the computer motherboard or in third-party software. CrystalDisk developer Mark has created a utility that you will need to check the SATA type. It will not only show the connected interface, but also other important information, such as the health of the disk, its temperature, "mileage", and so on.
There are many other applications on the Internet for testing the speed of your drives. In this article, we focused on only two, as we consider their capabilities sufficient for the average user. Paired with CrystalDisk Info, they provide the consumer with all the necessary tools to diagnose the speed and health of the drive.
