Marcus wrote:

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a hard disk benchmarking program that tests the whole
disk but in a few minutes, I use HD tach but the Burst Rate transfer only
goes up to 80 Mb/s and I'd like to test a UDMA 100 drive. Something similar
to HD tach would be fine.

TIA

Marcus

Burst rate is not a very useful indicator of real world performance - it only
measures data transfer in and out of the cache and ignores media transfer, and
media transfer is what you care about in the long run.

Go to http://www.storagereview.com and see how they test hard drives.

Last time I looked they relied on "Iometer" (written by Intel) to measure
performance.

A "good score" in a benchmark is meaningless unless it reflects what you spend
most of your time doing with the machine (or it spend doing). For example I'm
heavily into video editing. So for me, what matters more than anything else is
throughput in sequential writes/reads.

So don't worry about a "16000 SiSandra score" because in the end nobody cares -
what does it mean - nothing, it's an artificial number. You care about seek
time, I/O operations per second with a given file size, and media transfer
rate.

What you want out of a drive is : a big cache (8 MB or more), especially if you
capture video streams; high throughput as that'll help with large multimedia
files (I move gigabytes around every day); seek times as low as possible
(because low seek times are like a low CAS latency in RAM performance); noise
(because nobody wants to listen to a hard drive grinding away).

Storage Review is a GREAT resource for evaluating hard drive performance.

--Keith