Jason Phillips has a three-part series on hard drive benchmarking on the BleedinEdge. It is very thorough. Why does this matter? A poorly maintained hard drive decreases over-all system performance because apps use the drive-based page file when system memory is insufficient. This post summarizes the software reviewed.
- Disk Bench - "How fast are my disks really. In a real life situation." Copies file from A to B, times it, then deletes file. Small installation file, very simple, few configuration options, .NET affects performance. (free, v2.5.0.3)
- DiskSpeed32 - Tests drive cylinders, graph difficult to understand, long test (free)
- Drive Speed Checker - Free trial nags, advertising, one button to start test, tests read/write speed, directory lookup speed (free trial, $4.99, v1.5.5)
- HD Speed - Destructive write test (achtung!), measures sustained and burst data transfer rates in realtime (free, v1.5.2.61)
- HDD Speed Test - Basic tests, option to disable system cache and pagefile (free, v1.0.11)
- HD Tach - low level hardware benchmark, measures sequential read speed, random access speed, interface burst speed and CPU utilization of drive; registered version adds sequential write testing (free trial, v3.0)
- Iometer - Originally developed by Intel for single and clustered systems, not user friendly, advanced, use to compare with advertised specs, used by manufacturers (free)
- IOzone - not tested
- MHDD - not tested (v4.6)
- PassMark Performance Test - sequential rw, random seek+rw, easy to install and use, includes many other tests (free trial 30 days, $24, v6.1)
