[Guidance]: External Hard Drive Speed Test and Make It Faster

Why need an external hard drive speed test?

An external hard drive is a storage device used to store various data of users. When an electronic device needs to read and write data in an external hard drive, the performance of the device depends on the speed of the connected external hard drive.

Since the read and write speed of a hard drive can have a significant impact on the performance of an electronic device, users may need to test its read and write speed to see if a new hard drive needs to be replaced. Especially some game players want to run PS4/PS5/XBOX ONE external hard drive speed test, because the speed of the external hard drive is related to their gaming experience. If the test results are not satisfactory, the user may take some measures to improve the speed of the external hard drive.

This article aims to tell you how to use the test utility to run an external hard drive speed test, and what you can do if the test result is external hard drive slow.

How to run external hard drive speed test

Next, I will introduce two tools to test external hard drive speed, including Windows built-in tool and more powerful third-party software. You can choose one of them according to your needs.

│ Method 1. Check external hard drive speed without software

If you don't want to install other third-party programs on your PC, then you can test the speed of your external hard drive through Task Manager. This is the easiest way, but Task Manager can only provide some basic data.

Step 1. Enter “Task Manager” in the search bar and open it.

Step 2. Once opened, browse to the “Performance” option.

Step 3. Select the target disk to be tested from the list on the left.

│ Method 2. Run external hard drive speed test with a professional disk speed test tool

As you can see, there is limited information you can get from Task Manager about the speed of your external hard drive. If you want to know more about the speed of external hard drives, you have to look for other ways.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a powerful disk speed test software. It supports two test modes: Simple Mode and Expert Mode. It provides more accurate and detailed test results and allows users to export test results.

Please download the demo version to see how it works.

Step 1. Download and install this professional disk speed test utility, then launch it.

Step 2. On the main interface, click “Test” on the top side and choose “Disk Speed Test”.

Step 3. In this window, click “Pro Mode” in the left corner.

Step 4. In the new window, you can change various default parameters.

Step 5. After setting all parameters, click “Start”. After the test is over, you can click “Export” to export the test results.

Step-by step: Make external hard drive run faster on Windows

After testing the external hard drive speed, you may not be satisfied with the read-write speed of the external hard drive, so how to improve its performance?

In addition to testing hard drive speed, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can do more. If your hard drive is HDD, then you can run disk defrag or extend the partition space. If the hard drive is an SSD, then you can do 4K alignment.

Disk defrag is the continuous rearrangement of discontinuous data on sectors. In this way, when the computer reads the data, the search time is shortened and the speed is improved. Here are the detail steps you can refer to:

Step 1. Click the disk and choose "Disk Defrag" on the right pane.

Step 2. In the “Disk Defrag” Window, click on the “Schedule” button. But you can also directly defrag the disk or partition if you want.

Step 3. Now, you can choose which drive to defrag and decide whether to run a defrag daily, weekly, or monthly. Then, you can consider presetting on what conditions to defrag.

Step 4. Tick “Conditions” and click “Define”, you can set the rate of fragmentation to trigger the schedule to defrag your disk. And there is “minutes” for idle time, this is to make sure the program won’t hurt the data of other programs. Click “OK” to save all settings.

Bottom line

From what has been discussed above, you can find two external hard drive speed test tools in this article. The speed of the external hard drive has a great impact on the performance of the computer. If you want to know the speed of the hard disk, then please take these test methods and use the above schemes to speed up.

If you want to take these actions in Windows Server, please switch to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server, which is designed for Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012 users.