All, I have not seen a disk speed test for the new 8Tb SSD in the 16' MacBook Pro, so I just ran the BlackMagic read and write speed tests. I have attached the results. Write speed: 2906 Mb/s Read speed: 2806 Mb/s See the attached file for the complete results. How to benchmark your Mac hard drive and SSD. When it comes to measuring your hard drive or SSD performance, the best utility to use is Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. It’s a simple tool that allows to quickly test your disk speed for working with high-quality videos and demanding applications. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a tool for checking the performance of a hard drive. Designed for Macintosh, this tool uses a standard method to determine the reading and writing speed of your hard drive. In order to do this, it only fills in the. The Mac's native Disk Utility application can help determine whether a system's hard drive is encountering trouble. While Disk Utility doesn't fix physically failing disks, it can help speed. My HDD Speed is a free-to-use HD speed monitor and speed tester that provides the.

1. Test Hard Disk Speed Mac
2. Test Speed Of Mac
3. Test Hard Disk Speed For Macbook Pro

With today’s demanding applications on our computers, it’s important to ensure that there are no slow-downs or bottlenecks in the system. One area that has traditionally been an issue is the read and write speed of hard drives.

The advent of the SSD — or solid state drive — has led to a great improvement in read and write speeds (especially in comparison to older mechanical HDDs), but it’s still crucial to test transfer speeds to determine how efficient a system is and whether there might be any hardware or software problems.

And as we use more and more storage solutions on a daily basis, including USB storage, it’s also important to benchmark these devices too.

In this article we’ll examine the best speed test and benchmark software tools for your computer’s hard drive, supporting either SSD or HDD types of hard disks.

The ranking in the list below is in no particular order.

Table of Contents

1) ATTO Disk Benchmark

This is one of the leading benchmarking tools from a respected name. It will work on both HDD and SSD as well as RAID array disks. This makes it ideal for businesses and large companies that need to determine where there might be transfer speed issues in their systems.

Using a convenient interface where all of the relevant information is available in one window, ATTO Disk Benchmark remains a firm favorite with network technicians in the industry. It works on Windows OS but also there is a macOS version as well.

2) HDTach

What makes this application different from most other disk benchmarking tools is that it tests transfer speeds on all areas of the drive.

In hard disks, the data transfer speeds on the outside of the physical disk platter are higher than transfer speeds on the inside. This can distort the readings of transfer speeds.

What HDTach does is to use a VXD kernel mode to bypass the file system. It then accesses areas all over the disk and logs the transfer speeds in a file.

This results in a more accurate report on hard disk performance and provides much more relevant information.

3) MiniTool Partition Wizard

The MiniTool Partition Wizard is primarily aimed at users who need to resize, move, split, and format partition areas of their HDDs or SSDs. This allows the installation of multiple operating systems, for example.

It can also test disk transfer speeds on all drives, including both HDD and SSD. This makes it the ideal multi-purpose disk tool for system administrators and even power home users who need such an advanced tool.

The other good news is that it comes in a free edition, which does include the disk speed benchmarking tools.

4) UserBenchmark

This free, attractive tool allows for not just testing of hard drive and SSD speeds but also RAM, CPU and GPU speeds.

It will even test the transfer speeds of attached USB storage. This makes it the ideal companion for home users who are curious about system performance or need to identify a potential bottleneck within their systems.

Test Hard Disk Speed Mac

It is a small download, is free to use, and presents all of the information in a very attractive interface that features graphical elements and color-coded benchmark logs.

Overall, this is a highly attractive piece of software that has proven to be very popular with many types of computer users.

5) Crystal Disk Mark

This small speed benchmarking utility is for users who just need to see speeds presented in a very simple way. Unlike other utilities, Crystal Disk does not contain any extra bells and whistles. What is unusual is that it also features an anime-themed edition called the Shizuku Edition.

This may suit people who just need a simple, free benchmarking utility that won’t take up much space and won’t confuse them with too much information on the screen.

6) My HDD Speed

Available from the long-lived and much-loved Majorgeeks website, this tiny utility allows people to see the speed performance of their HDDs in real time. Once again, this software does not contain too many extras that could become confusing for a user. It does one thing and does it very well.

At less than 150 KB, this is a tiny program that may suit users just looking to test their system speeds.

7) Anvil’s Storage Utilities

As the world is moving to better and bigger solid state storage, more benchmarking tools are supporting them.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities has been designed to test both mechanical hard drives and SSDs but it really does do a great job on solid state drives specifically.

If you or your company have moved entirely to solid state drive storage, this is a tool that will run diagnostic and custom speed tests. Because it has been designed with solid state drives in mind, it is the ideal tool to use.

One feature that most other tools do not have is that Anvil’s tool displays both MB per second and IOPS when measuring the speed of disks.

8) AS SSD Benchmark

As with Anvil’s Utilities, this tool has been designed with solid state drives in mind. As we are now using more of them at home and in business, it’s also important to have a speed benchmarking tool that can provide up-to-date, relevant information on transfer speeds for this relatively new technology.

AS SSD Benchmark is small and comes in a free edition that allows anyone to get the most out of it before deciding to donate to support the developers. Since it doesn’t even need to be installed on a system and can be executed from a single file, this makes it ideal to carry around on a portable drive.

Like the previous tool, this one also measures the disk speed using MB /sec and also IOPS (input-output operations per sec).

9) jDiskMark

jDiskMark is a benchmarking tool that has been written in Java. Some years ago, Java was all the rage in the IT community but it has since become an outlier.

Having said that, the real advantage to Java is that it is cross-platform. This means that jDiskMark will even run on Linux and BSD-based systems as well as Windows.

It may be a small download, but jDiskMark features an easy-to-understand traditional interface that provides all of the information necessary.

10) PassMark Advanced Disk Test

This no-fuss benchmarking solution is ideal for those who need an uncluttered view of disk speed tests. It supports multiple threads; testing on different hard drives and SSDs can be done simultaneously using threaded processing.

This fast, efficient processing makes it the ideal choice for large-scale environments where testing of multiple storage sources needs to be done, including HDD, SSD, USB storage, RAID set-ups, SCSI storage, and networked drives.

11) Parkdale

Have you ever wanted to check the transfer speed of your CD-ROM drives in addition to your hard disk? Parkdale allows you to do that as well as test and benchmark speeds of hard disks, solid state drives, and even networked drives and servers.

What makes this small tool interesting is that all of that speed data can easily be compared to their benchmark test results page.

All you need to do is enter the device you’ve tested and then the value. This will log it and then compare it with other results that people have submitted, making it very easy to determine what speeds are normal.

12) Roadkil’s Disk Speed

If you have an older system that is before Windows 10, this tiny disk benchmarking tool may be for you. The interface is a no-fuss, no bells and whistles affair. It has the look of a Windows XP tool and in reality, it is possibly better for older systems.

13) HDDScan

If you have concerns about the overall health of your drive, the free HDDScan software is worth downloading.

As well as setting the speed of hard drives, USB storage, and solid state drives, it will also access and display S.M.A.R.T information.

This provides an indication of the overall physical health of the drive, including bad sectors and bad blocks. This is useful for knowing when a drive might be about to fail.

Whether you are experiencing a slow system, your programs are slow to start up, or you think that your attached drives could be about to fail, this tiny piece of free software can provide some peace of mind. It may even end up saving you from the loss of valuable data.

14) AJA System Test

Available for both Mac and Windows, this attractive piece of software is ideal for people who need an industry-recognized tool.

If you are in the graphic design or media industry and you rely heavily on computers for daily work, this tool is ideal.

All of the relevant information is presented in an attractive single-screen format with large color-coded graphics and easy-to-find options.

If you depend on fast PCIe transfer speeds, AJA System Test can also test the input-output speeds of these industry-standard cards.

Just bear in mind that you’ll need to pay for the full version to access this additional functionality.

Conclusion

As our Internet connection speeds have increased and our software applications have become bigger and more demanding of resources, it’s important to understand how fast your hard drive and solid state drive transfer speeds are.

WindowsMac equivalentHomefn arrow leftEndfn arrow rightPage Upfn arrow upPage Downfn arrow downScreen rightfn option arrow downScreen leftfn option arrow upMove to Last cellfn control arrow rightMove to first cellfn control arrow leftDeletefn DeleteBackspaceDeleteThe substitutions let you perform the same actions you can do in Windows. However, T hey can make some shortcuts seem complicated on a Mac because you have to use more keys.Note: If you're using an extended keyboard on a Mac, you don't need to worry about substitutions, since you'll have keys for Home, End, Page up, etc.Extended keyboards have all the keys 4. Shift enter in excel formula. Ribbon shortcutsIn the world of shortcuts, perhaps the most painful difference on a Mac is a lack of ribbon shortcuts.In Excel on Windows, you can use so called accelerator keys to access almost every command in Excel using only your keyboard.

Agile Commander for Mac, free download. Agile Commander for Mac 1.2.2: Agile Commander is a desktop kanban board for IT project management Its goal is to be extremely powerful for single programmers (indie developers, freelancers, start-ups) and small teams. The actual developer of this Mac application is Agile Agenda. The bundle identifier for this application is com.agileagenda.AgileAgenda.F49A4D8DF78A1FEE7A3BE440DC11BAB18D922274. AgileAgenda for Mac is categorized as Business Tools. The most popular version among AgileAgenda for Mac users is 2.0. Agile for mac. AmpKit: Now Rocking Your Mac AmpKit, the amp & effects app downloaded by over 600,000 iPad and iPhone users worldwide, is now available for your Mac! Simply connect your guitar to your Mac using a guitar interface (like AmpKit LiNK HD), and your Mac is transformed a powerful amp, effects and recording studio. Agile Commander is a desktop kanban board for IT project management. Its goal is to be extremely powerful for single programmers (indie developers, freelancers, start-ups) and small teams. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a 'big bang' launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments.

This has implications in business because any slowdown can affect performance and delivery on a daily basis. This is why disk benchmarking tools are so important to the system administrator and even the curious home computer user.

Thanks. The submission had the same command twice, and as it was anonymous, I couldn't contact the poster. I did some Googling and found that second command. It seemed to work for me, but I've changed it in the hint.

The read speed test is flawed as written. Using /dev/zero as dd's input and output file doesn't hit the disk at all and will return ridiculous speeds like 15-20 GB/sec. The proper way to do the read test is to be to dd the tstfile created by the write benchmark into /dev/null (but only after clearing the RAM cache by using the 'purge' command).
This one-liner will test the write speed, clear the cache, properly test the read speed, and then remove tstfile to reclaim disk space:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024 && purge && dd if=tstfile bs=1024k of=/dev/null count=1024 && rm tstfile

Here's what I get using this method (and dividing by 1048576 to get Mb/sec):
Internal laptop hd (7200 rpm, sata): Write=42.99 Mb/sec, Read=38.09 Mb/sec
External G-Raid (esata): Write=134.76 Mb/sec, Read=192.32 Mb/sec
External Seagate hd (laptop drive, USB-2): Write=33.59 Mb/sec, Read=36.38 Mb/sec
External G-Raid (Firewire 800): Write=60.79 Mb/sec, Read=66.17 Mb/sec
Encrypted sparsebundle image on external G-Raid above (esata): Write=68.66 Mb/sec, Read=81.33 Mb/sec

That's not really very fast for Thunderbolt.
I bought a Factory Refurb LaCie Little Big Drive for $229 (LaCie.com), removed the drives and the fan, and replaced the drives with a pair of SSDs. Using RAID0, I get around 450MB/s read and 360MB/s write speeds with every test I've tried. It's much faster than the internal SSD in my 2011 iMac.

The freeware Xbench's Disk Test offers a nice method for getting a few different kinds of disk benchmarks.

Also keep in mind it's only as fast as your system's slowest bottleneck. I realized this myself when I recently upgraded my internal HDD to SSD. Obviously I didn't do proper research. I got a top of the line model and was expecting super fast speeds around 460MB/s on SATA-III, only to realize that my 2008 MBP only has SATA-I so I get about 120 MB/s.
Probably still faster than HDD, but I never did measure the speed before I upgraded.

You wouldn't save a great deal of money going sata-I or II ssd and this way you are future proof if you'll get a new mac.

That thought had occurred to me too. However if I was going to upgrade my Macbook Pro the new one would probably already have SSD and wouldn't be user-replaceable (like in the new Retina Display version)

When I tried:
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024 2>&1 | grep sec | awk '{print 'scale = 2 ; '$(NF-1048576) '}' | bc
I got:
awk: non-terminated string }cale = 2 .. at source line 1
context is
>>> <<<
awk: giving up
source line number 2
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4

That awk line has an extra quote, it appears.
Any way, I found that this works:
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024 2>&1 | grep sec | awk '{print $1 / 1024 / 1024 / $5, 'MB/sec' }'
You don't need bc at all, awk can do the arithmetic. I am dividing the total bytes by the total seconds and by
By the way, my standard internal drive in my 27' iMac (2.8GHz, a couple of years old) did the writing at 91 MB/sec.

Even better, leave out grep also. Awk can do its own pattern matching:
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, 'MB/sec' }'


Test Speed Of Mac

One additional thing that might be worth mentioning..your test file (tstfile) should be larger than the amount of physical ram.
This prevents caching and artificially inflated read speeds. Allow me to demo this on my snazzy new iMac with the PCI-e drive..
The system has 16GB of ram, a 3.5 GHz i7 and 512 GB PCI-e SSD:
madht@host (]> 01:19:24
~> time dd if=/dev/zero bs=2048k of=tstfile count=1024 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, 'MB/sec' }'
732.213 MB/sec
real 0m3.278s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m1.155s
Wow faaaast writes - love this drive..
now check the file size
madht@host (]> 01:20:12
~>ls -al tstfile
-rw-r--r--+ 1 user staff 2147483648 Jan 4 13:30 tstfile
2GB, way less than 16GB.
Now lets Read it back..
madht@host (]> 01:30:19
~> time dd if=tstfile bs=2048k of=/dev/null count=1024 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, 'MB/sec' }'
6262.12 MB/sec
real 0m0.329s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.329s
Mother of God!! 6.2 GB/sec!!
Hmmm..that can't be right.
So lets try a much larger test file.
NOTE: The file size does not *need* to exceed your total ram, just the amount you have free. If you feel this is a valuable use of your time ;) hint, hint -- then adjust block sizes and counts to just exceed the amount of free memory you have available.
Here Goes with a 16GB file:
madht@host (]> 01:30:44
~> time dd if=/dev/zero bs=2048k of=tstfile count=8192 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, 'MB/sec' }'
728.792 MB/sec
real 0m22.583s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m5.543s
Still bloody fast writes, yum.
Check the size (I always do)
madht@host (]> 01:42:45
~>ls -al tstfile
-rw-r--r--+ 1 user staff 17179869184 Jan 4 13:42 tstfile
Yep, that one there is a whale that can't be crammed into my ram.
madht@host (]> 01:42:49
~> time dd if=tstfile bs=2048k of=/dev/null count=8192 2>&1 | awk '/sec/ {print $1 / $5 / 1048576, 'MB/sec' }'
779.598 MB/sec
real 0m21.018s
user 0m0.006s
sys 0m4.323s
Aaaah much more like it. And still pretty performant, yo.
One more thing to add and I don't know if was already mentioned or not tl:dr -- this is a sequential test only. iow - this is as fast as it gets and in no way indicative of how your drive performs when ~30-50% of its reads and writes are random - i.e. during regular multi application usage of the OS. ioMeter is the best open source benchmarker out there however they don't fully support OSX, just the worker engine binaries -- so iometer itself would have to run on a separate machine. But it's doable ;)

Test Hard Disk Speed For Macbook Pro

Would anyone be able to tell me how to use these commands to test my USB 3.0 drives or Thunderbolt drives?