How to Know the Speed of My Hard Drive?

Hard drive speed: Something you need to know

As one of the most important pieces of hardware of the computer, a hard drive is a storage device in a personal computer to store data like operating system, downloads, programs, or private files. When accessing data, it takes different times to record data into the device and extract from it, which is called write speed and read speed respectively.

Actually, the write and read speed of the hard drive will affect the computer performance: If the speed is fast, you will get a good experience when using a computer, while if the speed is slow, you will feel your computer always lags and even stops sometimes. Therefore, it's necessary to test the speed of hard drive, so that you can take actions to fix a slow computer in time once you find the speed is slower than before.

However, you may ask, "How to know the speed of my hard drive?" Luckily, this article will introduce you to two methods to check hard drive speed and how to make it faster as well.

How to know the speed of my hard drive?

Since it's urgent to perform a hard drive speed test, here are two methods you can apply as you like: one is using Task Manager, and the other is using a professional disk speed test software.

▶ Method 1. Using Task Manager

Task Manager is the Windows built-in feature. If you want to check your hard drive speed for free, it can be a good choice.

Step 1: Type "Task Manager" in the search box and hit "Enter".

Step 2: In the pop-out windows, click "Performance" on the top tabs.

Step 3: Choose the hard drive you want to test on the left column, and you will see the read and write speeds on the bottom.

✍ Note: Task Manager only shows the basic speed information, and the number is even changing, which is determined by what programs you are running on your background. Therefore, it's hard to know the real condition of your hard drive.

▶ Method 2. Using AOMEI Partition Assistant

As you can see, you can only get little information from Task Manager, if you want to know more, you need to ask a professional tool for help. In such case, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, designed for disk testing in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, or Vista, is a good helper for you to check your hard drive in a more concise and accurate way.

In this software, there are two modes provided for you to choose: Simple mode and Pro mode. In practice, Simple mode is similar to Task Manager, giving you a rough and general result of your hard drive speed. While Pro mode will check your hard drive comprehensively, so that you can know everything about your disk, like Average or Maximum speed, Test Size, and so on.

Now you may want to download the demo version to test your disk:

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Right click the disk you want to check and select "Test"> "Disk Speed Test".

Step 2. The Simple Mode is selected by default, please click "Pro Mode" to test your hard drive more accurately.

Step 3. In the new window, you can change the default settings as your like: Random or Sequential, Average or Maximum speed, Test Size, Number, and Duration (click the drop-down box to see the range you can set). After everything is set, click "Start" to begin testing.

Step 4. When the test gets done, you are able to see the result directly on the interface, and you can choose to export the result as you like: text or screenshot.（If the test stops at the duration, the already finished part can be seen and exported normally.)

Further reading: How to make your hard drive faster?

After you have known the speed of your hard drive, it's time to optimize its speed if you think it doesn't reach your expectation or it runs slower than before. Usually, Disk defrag and extending system drive will make a difference to improve the performance of the hard drive, which can also be realized by AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. In the latter contents, we will focus on Disk defrag and the detailed steps are as follows:

Step 1. Open AOMEI software and right-click the drive you want to defrag and select "Advanced"> "Defrag Partition".

Step 2. In the pop out window, you can see all your used drives. You can directly defrag the disk or partition, but here we recommend you to set a schedule. Click the button "Schedule" to move on.

Step 3. In the schedule settings, you can select drives, and the time mode to defrag the target drives. Just select a suitable mode according to your needs. And then tick "Conditions" and click "Define".

Step 4. Here, you can set the rate of fragmentation to trigger the schedule to defrag your disk. And there is "minutes" for idle time, which is to make sure the program won't hurt the data of other programs. Click "OK" to save all settings.

Then your computer will defrag selected drives when the environment is proper according to your settings.

Conclusion

Now, you can answer the question "how to know the speed of my hard drive" after reading this page. By contrast, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a good choice both in testing and advancing the speed of your hard drive. Moreover, this software is featured with many other useful functions such as moving apps/folders to another drive, converting system disk between MBR and GPT, migrating OS to HDD/SSD, and so on.