Advanced Disk Test - Hard drive benchmark

This Advanced Disk Test, which is part of PerformanceTest, measures the data transfer speed when reading or writing data to one or more disks. The speed that data can be transferred between memory and a hard disk drive is one of a system's most important performance aspects. There are quite a few factors which have a bearing on this speed and the Advanced Disk Drive Test allows the user to vary most of these factors and compare the results.

The test supports any drive that can be mounted under Windows. Including IDE drives, SCSI, RAID, USB key drives, SATA, networked shared drives and external drives.

Users have the ability to test multiple drives at the same time using multiple threads, and specify:

• The size of the test file used. Larger files mean that the system cache has less of an effect on the test types, which use caching (see below).
• The size of the data block used for each read or write request. Larger blocks mean less requests and can lead to an improvement in performance.
• The choice of four access methods - C/C++ API, Win32 API cached / uncached and raw disk access.
• Sequential or random access (seeking plus reading and writing)
• Synchronous and Asynchronous access
• The split between reading and writing

The results of all completed tests may be graphed using our custom graphing components.

Drive Performance

The PassMark Disk Performance test measures the data transfer speed when reading or writing data to specific Drive.

Users have the ability to select the disk drive for testing, file size, the units of measurement, test duration, sample frequency and test iterations. When selecting Run All, the test will run through a series of ten preset tests. Results and associated graphs to be exported as HTML.