Recommend a freeware utility to test my hard disk's speed?

ship

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Dec 16, 2009, 1:28:49 PM12/16/09

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Hi

Can anyone recommend a good free utility to test my hard disk's speed?
(running under WindowXP Pro).

Background:
I am looking to busy a new PC and I need to specify a fairly fast hard
disk (preferrably a Seagate one). But first I need to benchmark what
currenly I've got (which is a 3 year old Seagate 120Gb 7200rpm SATA
hard drive) so that I can get a feel for all this...

Fwiw, I just tried the "RoadKil" utility, but I didn't like it very
much - for one thing, it doesnt seem to test WRITE speeds...

Cheers

Ship
Shiperton Henether

Ed Jay

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Dec 16, 2009, 1:41:12 PM12/16/09

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ship scribed:

>Hi
>
>Can anyone recommend a good free utility to test my hard disk's speed?
>(running under WindowXP Pro).
>

HDTach. <http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach>

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Bob Willard

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Dec 16, 2009, 2:13:51 PM12/16/09

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Ed Jay wrote:
> ship scribed:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a good free utility to test my hard disk's speed?
>> (running under WindowXP Pro).
>>
> HDTach. <http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach>
>

Yup, I trust HDtach. But the free versions only test read speed. And,
if you get the non-free version to test write speed, note that it does
writes underneath the file system, so your files *will* be wiped out.
Also, HDtune only tests read speed. Its results are slightly
different from HDtach. Note that HDtach results IMHO are pretty
close to the vendor's specs for seek & access times, and for read BW;
so you can probably get by just trusting the vendor's data (as long
as you understand the limitations).

As motorheads say: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?"

Standard 7200 RPM HDs are pretty fast. WDC's 10K RPM HDs are faster.
If you care mostly about performance reading and writing long files,
then RAID-0 may be worth the higher cost (and lower reliability).
If you care mostly about performance reading and writing short files,
then minimizing seek times may justify using SSDs instead of HDs.
--
Cheers, Bob

Red E. Kilowatt

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Dec 16, 2009, 4:08:20 PM12/16/09

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I would think it would be hard to make meaningful measurements given the
impact of other software running in the background as well as the usual
fluctuating of Windows overhead.

If price is no object you can go with solid state drives (capacities are
up to 250 GB now) or WD Raptor.
--
Red

John Bokma

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Dec 16, 2009, 4:45:59 PM12/16/09

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"Red E. Kilowatt" <SPAM...@aww-faq.org> writes:

> If price is no object you can go with solid state drives (capacities are
> up to 250 GB now) or WD Raptor.

Or 2 disks and use striping. And/or put 16G or more in your computer and
cache a lot of data. It depends a lot on what you are going to do with it.

--
John Bokma

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