So you bought a new hard disk and are excited about its size and speed? But if you want to know the real read and write speeds and other performance factors of your hard disk, then you can use the free CrystalDiskMark. It is a free software that can be used to benchmark your hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). CrystalDiskMark tests the read and write speeds of your HDD and SDD drives using four different test methods.
You can download CrystalDiskMark from its sourceforge webpage. The download is available both as an installer and as a portable ZIP archive. I suggest that you download the portable ZIP file because it does not require anything to be installed. After installing or extracting the contents of the portable downloaded file, you can run CrystalDiskMark. You have to select number of Test Runs, Test Size and Test Drive (partition). By default the number of runs is 5 and amount of test size is 1000MB. But you can lower these values to finish the tests quickly. After this you can click on the All button to start the tests.
If you want to run only one test, then you can click on the respective buttons (Seq, 512K, 4K, 4K QD32) for these tests. The tests take a few minutes to complete and the results for the read and write speeds are shown immediately. Some antivirus programs like Norton or Avira might issue warnings when the 4K QD32 test is being performed.
You can copy the results to the clipboard using the menubar Edit → Copy or by simply using the hotkey Ctrl+C. The CrystalDiskMark also allows you to change the themes from the Themes command in the menubar. You can choose from Blue, Green, Flower and Wine themes.
CrystalDiskMark provides the basic read and write speed tests for your HDD and SDD drives. Unlike many difficult to use applications, it is very simple to use and the results are shown in a very easy to read fashion. It is designed by the same developers who have designed CrystalDiskInfo which is used for checking your HDD or SDD health status.
You can download CrystalDiskMark from http://crystalmark.info/.