How to check a hard disk performance and efficiency
The hard disk is one of the components of the computer system because it stores an operating system. Most people think that by using powerful CPU and RAM they can speed up their computer but that is not true. The speed of the hard disk is most important for the performance of the computer system if the hard disk is slow it will load programs slowly and lag badly while multitasking, that is why high-speed hard disks are used.
There is so much software on the internet that we can use to check the performance of the hard disk. There are many free tools that are specially designed for checking the performance of the hard disk, some important tools are as follows that is run on the Windows system.
HD Tach
It is old software that gives good results but it is only run on Win XP or compatibility mode for XP in win vista and win 7. It tests the drive block by block that may in 32MB or 8MB. It take about 2 to 3 minutes to run the test. It shows the results in a graph and also shows CPU utilization.
The main features of this hard drive tester include:
- It reads the whole hard drive
- Provides a normal speed report
- it performs both sequential and random test
- It also tests the burst speed of the drive
HD Tune
It is the well known hard disk diagnostic utility. The free version of this tool is getting old but it works perfectly for checking errors and benchmarking. It shows three types of a result like minimum, maximum and average speed of the drive also with the average access time.
Parkdale
Nowadays Parkdale is the best tool to check the performance of the hard disk. It is a portable tool you can simply click on the file it will start to run.
Some of its features to test hard drive speed are:
- Transfers are measured in kilobytes or Megabytes
- Measures speeds of hard disks
- Has 3 different modes; File Access, Quick Access, and Block Access
- It is available for both Mac and Windows.
Crystal Disk Mark
This is a popular storage performance checker tool because it can produce good results for every type of storage device like USB, hard disk, etc. It is easy to use if we increase the number of passes to run it will give us an accurate result. We can run both a whole test or individual test as we want. A useful extra option for SSD drives is whether to fill the test data randomly or with 0’s or 1’s. This will affect the results on drives with hardware compression such as those with Sand force controllers. It is available in both installer and portable versions.
Some of its features to test hard drive speed are:
- Runs both sequential and random read/write tests.
- It can test any drive. This means you can perform an external hard drive speed test.
