Have you installed a new hard drive? Just added an SSD to your computer for speed? Are you sure everything is working correctly? The stability of our storage is always a priority, but the best way to get a solid reference on the performance of those drives is through benchmarks. The classic CrystalDiskMark helps you measure the speed of your disk, and it recently received an update, so it's worth getting a new copy and doing a review.
Why is it necessary to insist on running benchmarks on SSDs and hard drives? A quick search on Reddit and other forums confirms that manufacturers often change components in different generations of the same product family, and we've noticed that in most cases, those changes negatively affect performance.
Beyond the synthetic and artificial profile that some benchmarks may have, the first thing they do is help us confirm that we received the correct product, and that it works properly on our PC. In the past we've recommended options like AS SSD Benchmark, but the main reference remains CrystalDiskMark, which measures the speed of your disk, SSD, external drive, or USB stick in a matter of minutes, and we recommend getting a copy of its latest update.
How to measure the speed of your disk with CrystalDiskMark
In general, the factory settings in CrystalDiskMark are sufficient to measure speed on most drives, however, you'll need to go to the Settings section and enable NVMe mode if you plan to test one of those SSDs, to modify the test profile. Fortunately, things haven't changed too much in terms of interface, and we can still select both the number of tests and their size (5 passes of 1 GB is the standard).
The Profile section has a number of additional presets to evaluate our drives under other conditions beyond the default. Demo is the simplest mode, Real World and Peak Performance allow us to measure IOPS (Input/output operations per second), and the +Mix variants are useful for altering the ratio between read and write operations during the benchmark. Finally, the Theme section focuses on the appearance of CrystalDiskMark, with eight different styles, scale parameters for the main window, and the option to replace fonts.
Why is it important to keep CrystalDiskMark updated to measure the speed of our disks and SSDs? It's simple: We cannot compare results obtained with different versions. At the time of writing, the latest is 8.0.4a, and as always, I recommend the portable edition in the zip file, which also has support for older versions of Windows.
Official site and download: Click here
