SSD disk speed test. How to check disk speed - testing the performance of SSD and HDD drives

At active use PC, you probably often felt noticeable stutters and freezes in those moments when the cache hard drive significant amounts of data were recorded, or when you made a save during the game. The reason for this is that the speed is not high enough internal storage. As is known, hard drive- the most vulnerable component in the PC hardware configuration, and no matter how powerful the architecture of your PC is, even if you have installed a processor and a video card latest generation, if the hard drive is slow – stable game with a high FPS and high speed You will not be able to open web pages in a browser, or work in a text or spreadsheet editor. Today I'm going to talk about how to test your drive's speed, how to make sure your drive is fast enough to handle all the load placed on it, and how to compare it to an SSD drive you may have borrowed from friends for a couple of days use and test. By performing the check described below, you can verify whether the hard drive is the most weak link your system, and whether it needs to be replaced with a more productive and powerful one (fortunately, their price today has reached quite acceptable levels, and in terms of speed they are clearly ahead of HDD drives). Topic basic HDD comparisons And SSD drives we dedicated, in this same article we will check all the speed characteristics of our “workhorse”, and find out how much they are ahead (or behind) of each other.

For testing speed and performance hard drives you can find quite a lot of software that compares the speed of reading and writing data when various sizes block installed on the drive, as well as the queue depth. Write/read can be random and sequential - different types needed for disks different sizes and, accordingly, blocks. Sequential recording will be relevant for block sizes of 1024 KB and higher. For smaller sizes, random recording would be absolutely appropriate. In this review, I will focus on two system utilities that cope with the task literally “with a bang” with all the information and clarity - CrystalDiskMark and HD Tune.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is the most revered and sought after program both in overclocking circles and among ordinary technical enthusiasts who work detailed settings hardware base of their PCs who want to receive the most reliable and objective information about their drive.

Installation software tool passes quickly and painlessly. How to check disk speed using CrystalDiskMark?

The basic shape of the instrument is rather pretty and unsightly. First, we set the language to “Russian” so that in the future there will be no problems with accessing the menu.

There are 4 different performance tests available on the main form:

Seq Q32T1 – sequential read/write with queue depth of 32 and one pass

4K Q32T1 – random read/write with 4 KB block size, 32 queue depth and one pass

Seq – sequential read/write. As a rule, this is the test used by reviewers and technicians who are professionally involved in hardware testing.

4K – random read/write with a block size of 4 KB and a queue depth of 1.

What is meant by letter abbreviations here? Q32T1 is the number of passes and queue depth (can be set in parameters). In turn, 4K is the size of the unit being tested; it can take other values ​​(depending on the parameters, application version, etc.)

The top “All” button initiates an immediate start of checking all tests in order of priority.

The Read and Write columns are responsible for reading and writing measured data from the hard disk, respectively. At the top we see a drop-down menu strip (5, 1 Gib, C:\), providing additional information about the following parameters:

The first item is the number of checks (default 5). Determines the number of repetitions of measurements, according to the results of which the average value is displayed on the screen. It is worth noting that this parameter has a significant impact on the objectivity of measurements, but at the same time it takes a large amount of time for measurements.

File size (by default – 1 Gib). Defines the file size used for reading and writing when taking measurements.

Disk (C: 47% (63/133Gib) – provides the ability to select the disk to be tested (if your hard drive is divided into several logical devices).

The queue depth and number of passes can be changed in the options menu. To do this, go to the “Settings” item in the main menu and select the “Queue and threads” option here.

As a result, you will be taken to a form where you can change the specified values.

For an ordinary user, the parameters set to default will be enough, and the number of passes should be left at 3-5 times.

Important Note: the test disk, in order to obtain the most objective results, must not be completely filled, and the amount of unoccupied space must be at least 15-20%. In particular, the developers recommend turning off all active applications, in particular, this applies to torrents and other utilities that require system resources.

To run a test, click on one of the green buttons on the left, or click on the top one to run all tests. Read and write indicators will be displayed informatively in the corresponding fields.

Which obtained values ​​are we most interested in? The most interesting are the first and last line, responsible for the results of testing read and write operations of 4K blocks. The reason for this is as follows: during normal daily use of a PC, it is quite rare that when working with a disk, sequential reading and writing of information is involved. Random sectors are processed much more often (approximately 80% of all operations). Therefore, you should not believe the often inflated numbers indicated by marketers in booklets and advertising notes.

There are very few additional options here; perhaps I have already described most of them. As you can see, the utility is incredibly simple, but it works effectively, does not make you wait long for the check operation to complete, and provides a detailed answer to the question: “How to check disk speed?”

HD Tune

Although available on the official website paid version product (HD Tune Pro), we will focus on it free analogue, which can be downloaded from the downloads page. So, how to check disk speed using system utility HD Tune? Let's figure it out.

The application works in a slightly different way compared to CrystalDiskMark. After installing the program on the hard drive, launch the application and see the main window. There are four tabs available here: Benchmark, Info, Health and Error Scan. If you go to the Info and Health tabs, you can get detailed information about supported hard drive modes and the presence of faulty clusters in its structure, respectively. The Error Scan tab will scan the entire structure disk drive on performance and reliability, immediately highlighting for you information about possible errors and faulty cells, if any. This check is almost identical to the drive health check mechanism built into the operating system, so you won’t find anything new here.

We are most interested in the “Benchmark” tab, since it is with its help that we will find out how fast our hard drive is and will be able to compare it with the performance of the installed hardware SSD drive, that is, conduct a full test of the drive’s speed.

Now it’s time to translate the scales into Russian so that during the check you don’t get confused about what is what:

Transfer Rate (Minimum) – indicator minimum speed disk drive obtained as a result of verification (MB/sec)

Transfer Rate (Maximum) – indicator maximum speed disk drive obtained as a result of verification (MB/sec)

Transfer Rate (Average) – indicator of the average speed of a disk drive obtained as a result of testing (MB/sec)

Access Time – time spent accessing file objects (the lower the indicator, the better) (milisek)

Burst Rate – peak speed of the interface, i.e. limit (Mb/sec)

CPU Usage – percentage of used processor resources (%).

We go to the “Benchmark” tab and click the “Start” button to initialize and start the testing procedure, having first selected the disk we need from the list of available ones. It is important to understand that during testing you should disable the most active software products that consume processor resources: antiviruses, firewalls, torrents, browser downloads.

The verification process has now begun. If the system receives a load, the data on the graph will change synchronously and show the latest information. When enough time has passed (say, 5-10 minutes), the routine will be interrupted, and we will be able to visually study the information received. There is no need to stop the process manually, everything will happen automatically.

What data do we get from the graph to determine how to find out the disk speed? First of all, the minimum, maximum and average data transfer rates. These readings are comparable to similar indicators obtained from CrystalDiskMark. Next, yellow dots indicate disk access time indicators. Since the program accesses various logical devices and tracks on the disk, the point readings are set in an arbitrary manner, telling us about the spread of points across the structure of the drive.

For starters, there is the speed of transferring data packets between different areas of the drive (burst rate) and the percentage of processor load when transferring data. Next, let’s compare the readings with the SSD disk by selecting it from the appropriate list at the top of the form and running the testing routine again.

On the software market you can also find products such as HD Speed ​​and FC Test, but in terms of functionality they are significantly inferior to the tools we described above.

Now you know how to check disk speed using one of our suggested software products. Using this method, you can definitely tell whether your computer needs an upgrade disk device, does it have sufficient requirements to get rid of the role of the drive as a bottleneck (for example, does it have a SATA 3.0 bus and support for S.M.A.R.T technology), and does this guarantee an increase in the speed of your workhorse.

Greetings!
The speed and performance of everything depends on the performance of the disk (HDD, SSD) personal computer generally! However, to my surprise, quite large number users do not give due importance to this aspect. And this despite the fact that the speed of loading the operating system, launching programs, copying files and data from disk and back, etc. directly depends on the storage medium. In other words, a fairly large number of typical operations on a PC are tied to the memory subsystem.

Nowadays, computers and laptops are equipped with either traditional HDDs ( hard disk drive – hard drive), or the latest trend – SSD ( solid-state drive– solid state drive). Often, SSD drives are significantly faster in read/write speed than classic ones. HDD drives. For example, Windows 10 starts in 6..7 seconds, compared to 50 seconds booting from regular HDD– as you can see, the difference is quite significant!

This material will be devoted to ways to test speed and performance installed HDD or SSD drive.

CrystalDiskMark Review

Quite a popular utility for measuring and testing the speed of an HDD or SSD drive. She works great in Windows environment(XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10), is free and supports Russian interface language. Official website of the program: http://crystalmark.info/

For HDD testing or SSD in CrystalDiskMark you need to do the following:

1) Select write/read cycles. Default this figure equals 5 , which is the best option.

2) Then you need to select the size of the file to be recorded during the test. 1 GiB(1 Gigabyte) will be optimal.

3) Finally, you need to select the partition that will be used to test the disk. If you have multiple physical disks installed, then select the partition that is located on the disk you are interested in. In the example, there is only one installed hard drive and the partition is selected accordingly C:\.

4) To start the test, click on the green button All. By the way, in the vast majority of cases, what is of interest is the result of what is in the line SeqQ32T1- speed linear reading\records. You can start testing only the linear read/write speed by clicking the corresponding button.

Test results will be displayed in the columns:

Read– a parameter showing the speed of reading data from the disk under test.

Write– a similar parameter, but showing the recording speed of the hard drive being tested.

On the SSD tested in the example Kingston drive UV300 linear read speed was 546 MB/s - which is a very respectable result. In general, for the best representatives of SSD drives this parameter varies around 500.. 580 MB/s, taking into account the connection to the SATA3 connector on the motherboard.

If the speed of your SSD drive is significantly lower than that declared by the manufacturer, then it makes sense to check whether it is connected to SATA3.

How to determine the version and operating mode of a SATA port

The developer CrystalDiskMark has prudently created another diagnostic utility - CrystalDiskInfo. Its task is to display S.M.A.R.T information about the state of the disk, its temperature conditions and other parameters.

In general, it is a fairly convenient and visual utility that should be in service with users for whom it is important to monitor the condition of the disk (its health) in order to avoid data loss due to its possible failure.

After launching the utility, look at the information that is displayed in the line “ Transfer mode»:

SATA/600– means that the drive operates in SATA3 mode with a maximum throughput of 600 MB/s.

SATA/300– this parameter means that the drive operates in SATA2 mode with a maximum throughput of 300 MB/s.

It may also appear SATA/150(150MB/s) is the first version of the SATA standard and it is considered very outdated and does not meet modern requirements for the throughput of connected media.

Whereas a classic HDD is quite enough SATA2(300MB/s), then the SSD must be connected to the port SATA3, otherwise he will not be able to reveal his full speed potential.

AS SSD Benchmark review

I present to your attention another remarkable utility, the task of which is to test the speed of an HDD or SSD installed in a computer or laptop. Using it, you can just as easily find out the speed characteristics of the connected drive.

The utility is free, does not require installation and works in the Windows environment. Official website of the program: http://www.alex-is.de/

Management is carried out in a similar manner to the CrystalDiskMark program. Linear reading speed is displayed here in the graph Seq.

HD Tune Review

The HD Tune utility completes this review. The capabilities of this program are not limited to reading/writing speed testing. Among other things, it also allows you to monitor the health of the hard drive, its technical parameters and even scan the disk surface for errors.

If we focus on the possibilities of speed testing, here we can note the following:

• ability to separately set write or read testing
• convenient visual graph of write/read speed during testing
• ability to see peak speed and access time

The program runs in a Windows environment and represents convenient tools for monitoring and testing connected media.

Official website of the program: http://www.hdtune.com/

Brief summary

The speed of the connected media directly affects the overall performance of the computer or laptop. You should not neglect monitoring speed characteristics, because the overall comfort of working with a computer depends on this.

Now you know how to check the speed of the connected media, as well as possible nuances of its connection, which ultimately determine throughput connected HDD or SSD.

Important for the system. The device helps the device function, stores user data and is a kind of flash drive for the computer. But the hard drive can be very different, so many people want to know how to check speed hard disk.

Device operation

What is a hard drive needed for, and how does its speed affect performance? The storage device stores data and gives free access to it. The mechanism is built on magnetic recording.

From the outside it won't be easy to figure out how to find out the speed of your hard drive. Under the plastic case are located magnetic disks and read head. In working condition, it does not touch the plates. The minimum distance between parts ensures the process of reading and writing information due to air flow.

Now the hard drive is increasingly receiving criticism from users. Especially after the advent of the solid state drive. Thanks to SSD, users learned that the system can have a faster drive that can easily cope with the most resource-intensive tasks.

But so far, solid-state drives are very expensive, so most people use only a combined option or prefer to do without an SSD altogether.

Hard drive specifications

Before you understand how to check the speed of a hard drive, you need to understand what other hard drive parameters there are that would affect the performance of the device.

The railway interface is now universal. SATA III is the most common option for interaction between two devices, in our case a hard drive and a PC. Thanks to the interface, you can connect the hard drive to your computer, and they will interact correctly. Besides SATA, eSATA, SAS, FireWire, etc. are also available.

When choosing a hard drive, the user pays attention to capacity. For many this is the most main parameter, since you need to calculate how much information can be stored. Now the most optimal is a hard drive with a capacity of 500 GB - 1 TB. This is quite enough to install games, resource-intensive programs and download movies.

The following setting affects performance. Random access time indicates the average time it takes to position the head for reading and writing.

This parameter can have values ​​from 2.5 to 16 ms. The smaller it is, the faster the device will work. For comparison, all SSDs have random access times of less than 1 ms. Hence the lightning-fast loading of the system and resource-intensive programs working with the SSD.

The following setting also affects overall speed hard drive. How to check the number of spindle rotations? Here you can use the information on the Internet or install the appropriate utility.

This indicator provides information about the spindle speed. The characteristic affects access time and average data transfer speed. IN in this case It’s better to choose a hard drive that has a speed of 7200 rpm. Although a device with a speed of 5400 and 5900 may be suitable for home PCs, you need to be prepared for the fact that system loading and resource-intensive programs will load slowly.

For servers and workstations, hard drives with 10,000 and 15,000 rpm are chosen.

The data transfer speed can also be found out during the hard drive test. This indicator directly affects the performance of the hard drive. The higher the data transfer speed, the faster you can transfer files to the hard drive.

Examination

How to check speed work hard disk? Of course, the first thing that comes to mind in this case is special utilities. Thanks to the program, you can find out any parameters of the hard drive, as well as scan the device for errors.

But not only software can help you learn how to check the speed of your hard drive. Thanks to software components The computer can also analyze the device parameters.

Software components

To check your reading speed and recording hard disk, you must use a special command. But to do this you need to launch Command Prompt. In “Start” you need to select the “System” section, and then Windows. In the new window you can find “Command Prompt”. Next, right-click (RMB) to start the service as administrator.

You can also use the key combination Win + R, where “Win” is the operating system icon on the keyboard. In the “Run” line, enter the “cmd” command.

To test the hard drive, you must enter the command “winsat disk” without using quotes. The system will collect all data about the device and display it in a dialog box. What should you pay attention to?

Disk Random 16.0 Read, Disk Sequential 64.0 Read and Disk Sequential 64.0 Write. The device performance index will also be indicated, which can also be found in the system properties.

To obtain additional information about the railway, you must, without leaving “ Command line» enter the required commands. For example, to determine the reading speed, enter “-read”, write - “-write” (without quotes).

Programs

But best of all hard test disk can be navigated using support programs. For example, CrystalDiskMark is a simple and understandable software that will help collect data about the hard drive and solid state drive. It can be installed on your computer with operating system Windows versions XP and higher. From the official website you can download the utility for free and with a Russian interface.

You can also use the AS SSD Benchmark program. This utility is similar to the previous one and has a similar interface. It quickly collects data about a hard drive or solid-state drive and organizes it into a simple table. Despite the English interface, you can still understand the report and find the necessary data.

Setting up CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD Benchmark

Of course, you can go deeper into this issue and understand the technologies for overclocking a hard drive, but there is a big risk that inexperienced user may damage the device, which will lead to system failures. Therefore, many suggest regularly performing some operations that will help, albeit slightly, but still speed up the work of the railway.

It is advisable to check the disk regularly. To do this, you need to go to “My Computer”, select one of the sections and right-click on it. Then select “Properties” and go to the “Service” tab. Here you can defragment the disk.

When assessing the performance of hard drives, the most important characteristic is the data transfer rate. At the same time, a number of factors influence the speed and overall performance:

• Connection interface - SATA/IDE/SCSI (and for external drives- USB/FireWare/eSATA). All interfaces have different speed data exchange.
• Hard drive cache or buffer size. Increasing the buffer size allows you to increase the data transfer speed.
• Support for NCQ, TCQ and other performance improvement algorithms.
• Disk volume. The more data that can be written, the more time it takes to read the information.
• Density of information on the plates.
• And even file system affects the speed of data exchange.

But if we take two hard drives the same volume and the same interface, then the key performance factor will be spindle rotation speed.

What is a spindle

A spindle is a single axis in a hard drive on which several magnetic plates are installed. These plates are fixed to the spindle at a strictly defined distance. The distance must be such that when the platters rotate, the read heads can read and write to the disk, but at the same time.

For the disk to function properly, the spindle motor must ensure stable rotation of the magnetic plates for thousands of hours. Therefore, it is not surprising that sometimes problems with the disk are associated precisely, and not at all with errors in the file system.

The motor is responsible for rotating the platters, and this allows the hard drive to operate.

What is spindle speed

Spindle speed determines how fast the platters rotate during normal hard drive operation. Rotation speed is measured in revolutions per minute (RpM).

The rotation speed determines how quickly the computer can receive data from the hard drive. Before the hard drive can read data, it must first find it.

The time it takes for to move to the requested track/cylinder is called search time (seek latency). After the read heads move to the desired track/cylinder, you must wait until the plates rotate so that the required sector is under the head. It's called rotational latency time and is a direct function of spindle speed. That is, than faster speed spindle, the less rotation delay.

The general delays during search and rotation delays determine the speed of data access. In many evaluation programs hdd speeds this is a parameter access to data time.

What is affected by the spindle speed of a hard drive?

Most standard 3.5″ hard drives today have a spindle speed of 7200 rpm. For such disks, the time it takes to complete half a revolution ( avg. rotational latency), is 4.2 ms. The average seek time for these drives is about 8.5 ms, which allows data access in about 12.7 ms.

WD Raptor hard drives have a magnetic platter rotation speed of 10,000 rpm. This reduces the average rotation latency to 3ms. “Raptors” also have plates of a smaller diameter, which reduced the average search time to ~5.5 ms. The resulting average data access time is approximately 8.5 ms.

There are several SCSI models (for example, the Seagate Cheetah) that have spindle speeds of up to 15,000 rpm and even smaller platters than the WD Raptor. Their average rotational latency is 2 ms (60 sec / 15,000 RPM / 2), average search time is 3.8 ms, average data access time is 5.8 ms.

Discs with high frequency spindle rotations have low values ​​of both search time and rotation delay (even with random access). It is clear that hard drives with a spindle frequency of 5600 and 7200 they have lower productivity.

In this case, when accessing data sequentially in large blocks, the difference will be insignificant, since there is no delay in accessing the data. Therefore, it is recommended to regularly defragment hard drives.

How to find out the spindle speed of a hard drive

On some models, the spindle speed is written directly on the sticker. Finding this information is not difficult, since there are few options - 5400, 7200 or 10,000 RpM.

A criterion for assessing the performance of any media digital information, is the speed of writing and reading data. This indicator can directly affect the performance of the computer where this hard drive, SSD or USB drive is installed.

If you want to check the read and write speed of your hard drive, at which your drive is capable of operating, then you need to download free program CrystalDiskMark for Windows. In addition to calculating the above parameters, the capabilities of this program can be used to check the characteristics that the manufacturer indicates on their devices.

Before running the read and write speed test of hard drives (HDD) and SSDs, you should select its type. There are four of them in the program.

1. CrystalDiskMark will write sequential blocks of 1024 kilobytes in size
2. The writing procedure will be random, and the block size will be 512 kilobytes.
3. The third type of test will take place when writing stacks, the size of which will be equal to 4 kilobytes.
4. Random write test with a block size of 4 kilobytes and a queue depth of 32 (for AHCI and NCQ).

In addition, when running the test mode you have chosen, you need to determine the type of data that will be recorded during the testing process. With the default selection, CrystalDiskMark will conduct random entries ones and zeros.

With this type of testing, the response time of the hard drive may be slightly overestimated. For drives of type SSD is better select the record type All 0x00, then the recorded data will be represented as zeros. The third type, All 0xFF, will produce random records that will consist entirely of ones.

Once you have determined all the test parameters, you can select the number of write cycles that CrystalDiskMark will perform during testing (from one to nine). The final parameter of the HDD read and write test will be to determine the size of the data written in its process (from 50 megabytes).

After selecting all the above options, you will need to select the media to be scanned from the list. After this, all testing can be started by clicking on the “Start” button.” If you want to carry out all types of diagnostics automatically, the “All” button activates this option.

It is important to note that before starting the scan you should close all active programs. Their work can negatively affect the results. We recommend download CrystalDiskMark for Windows, as the most practical program for determining the read and write speed of hard and SSD drives.