Parkdale : Measure Hard Disk Read & Write Speeds

When I bought my new WD Caviar Green hard disk, I just added it to my computer as a secondary hard disk. But soon I discovered that the new hard disk worked faster and had better performance. It was useless to keep the operating system installed on my older hard disk when I had a faster hard disk at my avail. So finally I installed Windows on the new hard disk and improved my system performance. But you do not have to learn about your hard disk’s performance from actually using it in everyday life. You can just use the free Parkdale hard disk benchmark software which can measure the read and write speeds for your hard disks and optical disk drives.

You can get the Parkdale program from the SZ development website. The software is available as a portable program. You can download the ZIP archive, extract its contents to a folder and run Parkdale.exe from there.

The program has three types of speed tests – Quick Access, File Access and Block Access. The quick access test allows you to test the speed of your drives for sequential reads and writes. You can choose a file, block size and then click on the Start button to start the test. The results are displayed in the Parkdale window.

Parkdale Disk Benchmark

The file access test lets you choose a file from your hard disk and measures how fast your operating system can read or write the file. To test the file access read speed, you have to click on the Read button. Similarly, you can click on the Write button to check the file access write speed.

Parkdale Disk Benchmark

The block access test is for checking your optical disk drive read and write speed without going through the file system. It measures the disk speed by reading the disk sectors directly. The results are displayed in form of a graph or numbers.

Parkdale Disk Benchmark

Conclusion: Parkdale is a portable disk bench-marking tool that can test your hard disk or optical disk drives for read and write speeds in three different access modes – quick access, file access and block access.

You can download Parkdale from https://www.the-sz.com/products/parkdale/.