Reliable Hard Drive Speed Tester for Windows OS

How do I test my hard drive speed?

Aside from a decent CPU and memory chip, a hard drive plays a vital role in improving a computer's overall performance. Whether the disk is getting slow, you should test its read and write speeds to discover if you need to replace it.

Furthermore, before purchasing a new hard drive, you may use a hard drive speed tester to evaluate its performance.

How to test hard drive speed

In this part, we’ll show you 2 tools, a professional hard drive speed tester, and a Windows tool. You can choose the better one according to your situation.

Tool 1. Disk Speed Test feature from AOMEI Partition Assistant

To easily test disk speed and clearly understand the test report, a reliable and user-friendly hard drive speed tester is a necessity. There’re various options if you search online, but we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Easy-to-use disk speed test software, in addition to the professionalism it must have, is more important to meet the needs of different users. Some normal users may only need a simple test to have a view of their disk, while some PC guys will need more details.

Thus, to satisfy diverse requirements, the “Disk Speed Test” feature of AOMEI Partition Assistant gives all users 2 options:

• Simple Mode
Simple mode is the default mode of this function. Users can select a drive as the target to test only reading/writing speed. After the test, users can flexibly choose to export the test result to a clipboard, text, or screenshot.

• Pro Mode
If you need a more comprehensive test, you can choose this “Pro Mode”. In the Expert Mode, you can select the target drive, which speed you want to test (there’re maximum and average speeds you can choose), file size, test number, and duration. And then you can also set the test type: random and sequential, block size, queue number, and thread number.

The different test modes will report different test results. Expert Mode will have more details about the tested drive to help you assess disk performance.

Now, let’s try this tool to do a test.

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click “Test” in the top toolbar, and choose “Disk Speed Test”.

Step 2. The default mode is Simple Mode, click “Start” to run a simple speed test. Or click "Pro Mode" to get a more comprehensive test we introduced above.

Step 3. After the test, you can click “Export” to see the test result.

The operations are quite easy, with this tool, you can also test your external hard drive speed.

Tool 2. Task Manager in Windows

Microsoft also offers a tool, you can check disk speed via Task Manager.

Step 1. Right-click Task Bar on the bottom of your screen, and choose "Task Manager" in the extended menu.

Step 2. In the pop-out windows, you will see different tabs on the top, click "Performance".

Step 3. Choose the disk on the left column, and you will see the results of reading and write speeds.

Further tips: How to speed up HDD & SSD

If the speed test shows that your HDD or SSD might need to optimize, don’t worry, here, we list some available solutions as a reference.

▶ For HDD

1. Delete temp files

Step 1. Open “This Computer”, and click C drive.

Step 2. The temporary files usually have two locations: C:\Windows\Temp”, or “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp”.

2. Defrag HDD

When data or sections of files become distributed throughout your disks, this is referred to as disc fragmentation. System performance will suffer greatly if the hard drive is highly fragmented.

Defragment restructures the data on partitions so that files are placed in as much contiguous space as possible. And when the hard drive can discover the requested data and files more easily and quickly, the HDD's performance improves.

AOMEI Partition Assistant has a schedule defrag function, once you set a schedule, the tool will automatically defrag the target drive.

Step 1. Right-click the drive you want to defrag, choose “Advanced” and select “Defrag Partition”.

Step 2. Tick the target drive and click on “Schedule” to enter the “Schedule Setting” window.

Step 3. Tick the “Defrag” and you can choose from the given options such as frequency, date, time, etc.

Step 4. You can define the conditions in which you want to start the automatic disk defrag. Just click on “Conditions”.

▶ For SSD

1. Enable Trim

You can’t defrag SSD for disk optimization, because it will hurt your SSD. For the optimization of SSD, there’s a Trim feature you can employ in CMD.

Step 1. Press “Windows” + “R” and type CMD to open it.

Step 2. Type: “fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify” to check if the Trim feature is on or off.

DisableDeleteNotify = 0 : TRIM is already available and working in Windows
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 : TRIM is not available

Step 3. If it’s not available, please type: "fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify" and press “Enter” to enable Trim.

2. 4K alignment

The other way is to align the partition. You can also easily do this via AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Step 1. Select the partition that you want to align and right-click on it. Move the cursor to “Advanced” and select “Partition Alignment” which appears on the right.

Step 2. Set partition alignment to “4096 Sector” or you can also set it to the default one. Click on “OK” to proceed.

To sum up

Which one is the best hard drive speed tester for you?

As you can see, AOMEI Partition Assistant has various helpful functions for users to conveniently organize the PC resources, not only for Windows PC, but also for the Server Edition and the Tech Edition for enterprise users to manage all devices easier.