When you have to work with applications that require fast data read/write rates then you have to make sure that the hard disk you have in your PC can yield the desired results. The simplest way to do this to run a benchmark on your storage disk and find out if it can fulfill all of your requirements. And if you are using a Windows PC, then you can use Microsoft’s own DiskSpeed tool to benchmark the storage disks.
The DiskSpeed tool is designed to perform the benchmark on a range of different types of storage media. The original diskspd.exe tool is actually a command line tool. You can open an elevated command prompt and give the commands to run various different types of tests. For example, you can run a simple read/write test by giving this command diskspd.exe -c8129K -d1 testfile.dat.
But if you do not want to use the command line interface, then there is also a GUI for the diskspd.exe tool called DiskSpeed. The DiskSpeed GUI is also designed by Microsoft and can run many different types of tests using the command line diskspd.exe tool but at the click of a button.
DiskSpeed is basically a PowerShell script and it should be launched from within an elevated PowerShell. Before you can launch the downloaded DiskSpeed PowerShell script, you might have to set the Execution Policy to the appropriate value so that this script can be launched.
In the DiskSpeed GUI, it shows a number of pre-configured tests like database server, email server, VDI workload, streaming media server and archival file server. You can also add your own custom tests by clicking on the Add Test button. You can even export your custom tests to an XML file so that you can run them later for a different storage disk. The results can be exported to a CSV or HTML file.
Conclusion: DiskSpeed is a fast and lightweight storage media benchmarking tool that works on a variety of storage disks. It can be run either from a command line interface or you can use the easy to use graphical user interface.
You can download DiskSpd CLI from https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpd-a-robust-storage-6cd2f223. You can download DiskSpeed GUI from https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpeed-90d37d55.