For some reason I am partial to Western Digital hard disks and always buy them. Last week was no different, when I had to buy a new hard disk for my friend Erin’s computer. The older hard disk had stopped working and I wanted to replace it with a larger one. We bought a SATA-III hard disk, only to realize that the motherboard supported only SATA-II technology. Though we fixed the problem by setting a jumper on the hard disk, but it resulted in reduced data transfer speeds. We used the free Drive Speed Test Tool to find out how much the data transfer speeds have suffered.
The Drive Speed Test Tool is a free Windows application that can check your hard disk as well optical disk data transfer speeds. The application uses three different methods to test the disk speeds – serial writes followed by serial reads, multiple writes followed by multiple reads and mixed writes followed by mixed reads.
After launching the Drive Speed Test Tool, you can select one of the target disk drives (partitions) from the drop down list. The tests would be performed on these target destination partitions or drives. The sample data rates would be automatically selected for you, but you can also customize them yourself. You can also choose one of the three test methods from the options. There are options to disable the operating system cache and drive cache too and both of which should be disabled to measure the actual drive speeds.
As you press the Start button, the selected drive or partition would be subjected to the tests. The tests would go on for some time and a graphical chart display of the data transfer would be shown to you. You can save this chart in form of a PNG image file too.
When the test is complete, it will switch from the graphical chart to text based results section. The text results show you read and write speeds for all the files on your hard disk along with a final summary of the results.
You can compare your results with other people’s hard disk or upload your results online. If you choose to compare the results, a web browser window opens up displaying all the results for the make and model of your hard disk.
Conclusion: The Drive Speed Test Tool is an easy and fast disk drive benchmark utility. It can perform tests on all sorts of storage disk drives including hard disks, network drives, USB disk drives, memory cards and more.
You can download Drive Speed Test Tool from http://blog.oette.info/.