PC tricks

Hey,

Very are various different bottle necks on your Mac that effect the performance of your computer. Originally it would be your CPU being too slow, then RAM was an issue and resulted in a lot of disk paging. Now, I think, the issue of bottle necks on your system is your hard drive. This post will show you a cool app designed to test your hard drive speeds. Its one of the nicest looking, and easiest to use apps out there. Although you can use Activity Monitor to gauge the hard disk speed, this app can be used on individual disks.

The app in question is Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. It will test the speed of your hard drives in both read and write mode. When you open the app you have a couple of choices, the drive you want to test, which is useful if you have multiple drives and the size of the file it will test for. The bigger the file the more accurate result as it smooths out the inaccuracies due to the system having to access the disk at the same time.

After you hit run, you will be presented with an image similar to the following:

The app shows what speed you are running at for both the read and write operation. The app is also useful for showing many many frames per second you can watch HD movies at, although I do think these values are slightly inaccurate.

My super fast hard drive speeds are due to an SSD drive, I have the Corsair Force Series GT and it is amazing. My Mac boots super fast and apps open instantly, you sort of expect this to happen if you can read data at 420Mb/sec. I have also heard that the Crucial m4 and OCZ Vertex 4 are realy good too.

This is only a quick post, however I really do like the blackmagic tool. It is one of the best looking apps for doing this sort of thing. Its free, simple and does its job.

If you have any questions or comments about this app, please leave one using the form below.