With the increasing preponderance of SSDs in the marketplace, the importance of the storage subsystem has actually returned to the spotlight as SSDs have highlighted the effects of having slowly storehouse. For those who own a SSD or have experienced what it ’ s like to use one, you ’ ll know that slow memory can easily drag down an entire system even if your organization features the latest and greatest Intel Core i7 processor with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM .
As such, testing the performance of your HDD or SSD has become more authoritative than ever not entirely to figure out if your newfangled drive is actually performing as advertise, but besides to diagnose any issues that may prevent the drive from performing at its flower. Do you have the proper drivers installed ? Do you have the proper motherboard chipsets drivers installed ? Do you have your SATA SSD connected to the correct SATA port ? These are all questions that can be answered with some simple operation screen .
To help you test the performance of your HDD or SSD, here ’ s five of the best free tools for testing repositing performance.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark is one of the industry ’ sulfur oldest and most popular benchmarks for testing HDD and now SSD read/write speeds. This benchmarks allows easy read and write testing using predefined parry sizes between 512 bytes up to 8MB with trial file sizes between 64KB and 2GB and queue depths between 2 and 10, giving us a effective mind of read/write speeds with different size files. By enabling Direct I/O and Overlapped I/O, ATTO Disk Benchmark will besides remove any performance benefits from system hoard, providing the most accurate results. ATTO Disk Benchmark is typically the benchmark of choice for consumer SSD manufacturers as it tests using dim-witted, highly compressible data, which tends to yield best performance .
Download ATTO Disk Benchmark
Crystal Disk Mark
crystal Disk Mark is another democratic benchmark which allows us to measure both consecutive read/write speeds equally well as random read/write speeds for a diverseness of different storage products including HDDs, SSDs, memory cards, network drives, and more. With this benchmark, tests can be run using both random meet ( incompressible data ) and 0 fill ( compressible data ) .
Download Crystal Disk Mark
AS SSD
AS SSD is a identical normally used benchmark used to measure HDD and SSD performance in consecutive, 4K, 4K QD64 and rotational latency. Tests are run using 100 % incompressible data. AS SSD besides outputs a final score at the conclusion of the test based off the overall operation of the driveway. AS SSD besides provides several useful tools including a copy benchmark which will allow benchmarking a file transcript process equally well as a compression benchmark which shows performance at different levels of file compaction .
Download AS SSD
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage Utilities is not entirely among the most sport filled benchmarks for testing SSDs and HDDs, but it ’ s besides identical slowly to use. once open, merely click the boastfully “ Run ” release which will automatically run both the read and compose tests for consecutive, 4K, 4K QD4, 4K QD16, 32K, and 128K. After testing, the utility will provide a count of different results such as reaction fourth dimension, read/write operation in MB/s and IOPS .
Download Anvil Storage Utilities
Iometer
primitively developed by Intel and announced at Intel Developer Forum in 1998, Iometer has promptly become one of the most democratic storage testing utilities in the industry. Although the interface for the utility program international relations and security network ’ metric ton as drug user friendly as any of the other utilities in our list, Iometer makes up for this with its is ability to be configured for a wide variety of workloads deoxyadenosine monophosphate well as more in-depth examination and coverage capabilities .
Download Iometer
Understanding HDD and SSD Benchmarks
so now that you ’ ve run the benchmark and have the numbers in hand, what the heck do they all mean ? Well, be sure to check out our article on understand repositing benchmarks to learn more .
For a flying compendious :
Throughput – Throughput is the measure of travel rapidly at which data is transferred and is broadly measured in KB/s, MB/s or GB/s. As a result, by and large speaking the higher the throughput rush, the better. however, when measuring throughput, it ’ second besides authoritative to figure out what charge size is being transferred. HDDs for exercise can perform well when it ’ second allowed to ramp up speed and access data consecutive, but falls on its face when asked to access small files in a random order .
IOPS – As throughput measures the travel rapidly at which data is transferred, IOPS measures the input and output signal operations per moment. This is a much more effective room of testing SSDs which can perform hundreds of thousands of input/output operations per second when working with smaller files such as those that are fair 4K and 8K in size. In general, the higher the IOPS, the better .
Latency (ns, ms) – Latency measures how long it takes for an IO operation to go from beginning to end. The lower the latency, the better .
