AIDA64
AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring.
It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I’ll be using.
Linear Performance
The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view on the drives overall performance from start to end.
Random Performance
The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation.
Access Times
The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface.
Drive Comparison
I haven’t noticed tests of writing a large amount of data (many GB). Maybe I just missed it. My Sandisk USB disk writes about 80MB/s for the first 1GB or so, but if there’s more data to write, speed drops to 20MB/s (as measured by Windows when copying to the drive). Presumably it has a fast buffer of a certain size. That’s why when flash storage is reviewed I want to see results of writing a larger amount of data. It’s easy to cater to benchmarks with a buffer, but if sustained write is a lot slower, that’s a problem for real world use.