Program to measure speed of Hdd?

[ZrByte]

Title says it all really, would like something that measures transfer speeds of my Disk drives, somthing like the download Dialogue in Internet explorer would be perfect, (i.e. Showing Amount transfered and KB/sec or MB/sec )

Any ideas? or is there something built into windows I have never found?

[snuffs99]

this has a few good hdd speed/transfer tests on it aswell as having other great utils.

http://www.ultimatebootdisk.com

Hope this helps in some way.

Re:

Snuffs

[ZrByte]

Originally Posted by snuffs99

this has a few good hdd speed/transfer tests on it aswell as having other great utils.

http://www.ultimatebootdisk.com

Hope this helps in some way.

Re:

Snuffs

Thanks, I thought this thread had been missed since I posted it when all the server problems where at thier worst.
Im gonna have a look at those utils now, see if there is anything of use to me. Will post back in a bit once I have had a look.

Thanks again

[ZrByte]

Originally Posted by ZrByte

Thanks, I thought this thread had been missed since I posted it when all the server problems where at thier worst.
Im gonna have a look at those utils now, see if there is anything of use to me. Will post back in a bit once I have had a look.

Thanks again

Sadly I cant seem to find anything of use. Anything I search for seems to turn up a shop to buy hard drives from. and none of the above catagories seem to fit

Just to clear things up a lil aswel, I dont want to benchmark my drive or anything like that, rather, when copying a file from one disk to another you get the windows dialogue showing you (Rather inacuratley) Transfer time remaining and a progress bar (Also very unacurate) showing you how much has transfered. What I would like is something more like the Internet explorer Dialogue when you download off a site, stating how large the file is (In KB, MB or GB) How much data you have so far (also in KB, MB or GB) and how fast it is transfering (Again in KB/s, or MB/s )

I know a method of doing this but it involves a lot of playing around with FTP's and I have no way of seeing how accurate this is to know if it is even reliable.

The reason I want to do this is to test My USB2.0 External Drive, I am in the process of RMA'ing the drive and it seems to have mysteriously come back to life. Occasionally there seems to be spikes in the windows progress bar when the transfer times increase from something like 30mins to 1hr30mins, this could be due to the drive getting ready to flake out again or Just a fault in the windows Tranfer progress Dialogue. However if I could see how fast the drive is transfering in KB/s or MB/s I would know if it was the drive at fault.

Did that make sense

Edit: think I may have found one http://www.webattack.com/get/hdspeed.html
will let you know if its anygood.

[ZrByte]

Sorry about the consecutive post but I didnt want to double edit the above post incase anybody who may be able to help doesnt check back because they think I havent posted again.

The program is useful, while it doesnt do exactly what I wanted it to do it does allow me to see hard drive usage in a similar way to how Network, CPU & Memory usage are displayed in windows task manager.

Strangley enough I cant use it to test my own transfers as it seems to severeley slow down the very transfer it is monitoring.
However if I check the box to test the Burst rate on the drive I can get the figures I need.

I dont think it is measuring the speed of the Drive in question accuratley though, this USB2.0 (480MB/s) hard drive is showing up at mereley 20MB/s Wheras my UDMA 100 Seagate barracuda is showing at 66MB/s and My Maxtor UDMA 133 is showing up at 105MB/s and my IBM udma 100 is showing up at 80MB/s.

It is possible that this drive is Just slow and thus needs replacing but it doesnt appear to be slow when I use it, infact transfers between the USB drive and the Maxtor drive are a few seconds faster than transfers between the Seagate drive and the maxtor drive so this leads me to think that this program doesnt measure USB speeds accuratley.

I must say it looks as though I should rearange my Drives slightly
Currently I boot off the Seagate (66MB/s 40GB)
Use the Maxtor as a small Data drive (105MB/s 40GB)

Looks like I should boot off the maxtor from now on wouldnt you say?

[rogercruse]

Try www.pcpitstop.com

It's free and checks a whole load of things of your pc and gives you a rating with suggestions.

You can then decide to follow up their suggestions via one of their links (that's how their get their money!) or not.

Roger...

[Stuartbe]

Originally Posted by ZrByte

Sorry about the consecutive post but I didnt want to double edit the above post incase anybody who may be able to help doesnt check back because they think I havent posted again.

The program is useful, while it doesnt do exactly what I wanted it to do it does allow me to see hard drive usage in a similar way to how Network, CPU & Memory usage are displayed in windows task manager.

Strangley enough I cant use it to test my own transfers as it seems to severeley slow down the very transfer it is monitoring.
However if I check the box to test the Burst rate on the drive I can get the figures I need.

I dont think it is measuring the speed of the Drive in question accuratley though, this USB2.0 (480MB/s) hard drive is showing up at mereley 20MB/s Wheras my UDMA 100 Seagate barracuda is showing at 66MB/s and My Maxtor UDMA 133 is showing up at 105MB/s and my IBM udma 100 is showing up at 80MB/s.

It is possible that this drive is Just slow and thus needs replacing but it doesnt appear to be slow when I use it, infact transfers between the USB drive and the Maxtor drive are a few seconds faster than transfers between the Seagate drive and the maxtor drive so this leads me to think that this program doesnt measure USB speeds accuratley.

I must say it looks as though I should rearange my Drives slightly
Currently I boot off the Seagate (66MB/s 40GB)
Use the Maxtor as a small Data drive (105MB/s 40GB)

Looks like I should boot off the maxtor from now on wouldnt you say?

Usb offers great burst rates but its not going to be faster than the onboard hdd's. If you are going to be moving very large files around you would be far better of with SCSI based hardware IMO...

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by stuartbe

Usb offers great burst rates but its not going to be faster than the onboard hdd's. If you are going to be moving very large files around you would be far better of with SCSI based hardware IMO...

Or firewire which can sustain the transfer rates.

[SOSAGES]

i think usb 2 will do just as good job as firewire (well not the new firewire obnviously)

scsi is not really an option for a home user he will need a scsi card and drive and large good ones aint cheap

i imagien sata is the way to go i have 3 scsi drives and 1 sata drive and im hard pushed to tell teh difference (except the scsi has a 5 year warrenty and sata 3)

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

i think usb 2 will do just as good job as firewire (well not the new firewire obnviously)

USB 2 can't keep up the sustained data transfer either. Have a butchers at this: http://www.barefeats.com/fire26.html

[bopdude]

Not sure but, if I remember correctly a year or so back whilst messing about with samurise you could measure all kinds of data transfer rates using their scripts, was a nice little prog ( must have a look at it again )


Anyhoo, not sure as i said but maybe worth a look see you never know

[Stuartbe]

Originally Posted by Bifta

USB 2 can't keep up the sustained data transfer either. Have a butchers at this: http://www.barefeats.com/fire26.html

Spot on m8 !!

P.S. Where's that rep you promised me ?

[SOSAGES]

im not sure you will notice the difference, but if its super critical use firewire, it has increased to 800 Mbps with 1394b. With optical cables, that can be bumped upto 1600 or 3200 Mbps. usb is best for low-speed devices 1394 has its advantages speed/distance, headroom, and simplicity etc but best not to worry to much ,..and neither usb or firewire will help he benchmark his drive to see if its running full whack

[ZrByte]

Originally Posted by Bifta

USB 2 can't keep up the sustained data transfer either. Have a butchers at this: http://www.barefeats.com/fire26.html

Well he clearly didnt have a very good USB2.0 device as even mine is running at 20MB/s, the fastest that one ran was 15MB/s.
Even still though, I dont see how my drive can be doing only 20MB/s while my others do 60+ yet this transfers between the drive that does 105MB/s faster than any of the drives that do 60MB/s do

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

imagien sata is the way to go i have 3 scsi drives and 1 sata drive and im hard pushed to tell teh difference (except the scsi has a 5 year warrenty and sata 3)

You cant get external SATA devices though can you? Even if I replace this disk im gonna want it to be external again, and I know you can get external SCSI devices.

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

and neither usb or firewire will help he benchmark his drive to see if its running full whack

Yup, thanks everybody for the great advice above but I think you lost track of what I was actually Testing for

Originally Posted by Stuartbe

Usb offers great burst rates but its not going to be faster than the onboard hdd's. If you are going to be moving very large files around you would be far better of with SCSI based hardware IMO...

Im not too bothered about actual transfer speeds as I dont really need it to be fast. The Main reason I am after this utility is to check to see if the drive is transferring stabily and not flaking out like it was doing less than 4 days ago.
Im a bit sceptical wether the drive is working or not as the only thing I changed on the drive was I destroyed the partition table (Created by Partition Magic, FAT32) and created a new one with Windows Drive manager (NTFS)
Since I was certain that the drive was suffering some sort of mechanical Failure I dont see how a new Partition table could do this.
a Full description of the fault the drive had is in this thread Here

Originally Posted by RogerCruse

Try www.pcpitstop.com

It's free and checks a whole load of things of your pc and gives you a rating with suggestions.

You can then decide to follow up their suggestions via one of their links (that's how their get their money!) or not.

Roger...

Well this is intersting, according to that site My External drive is the second fastest in my machine, Just 5MB/s slower than the Maxtor drive and both are coming uo at over 450Mb/s

Again though sadly this isnt the type of Program im after, I need to be able to monitor the drive in real time so a benchmark is no good, still very interesting though.
It looks like Samurise might be what im after though.
Thanks for all your help so far people

[deadite66]

perhaps try hdtach
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach