When you have Windows installed on a slow hard disk, it doesn’t matter how strong the other elements like CPU and memory are all, that the system will boot quicker, load software more slowly, and lag very badly while multitasking.
That is why high-performance hard drives and especially SSD’s are so popular nowadays. It is because updating only that single part can breath fresh life into a pc and make it feel a whole lot more snappy to utilize. The true hard disk drive or SSD functionality under Windows is dependent on numerous variables so how can you know whether your drive is doing well, requires tweaking, or is holding back the system?
Here are some awesome tools that help you test the performance of hard drives and SSD drives. You will find out the speed and health of your computer hardware components.
7 Best Free Tools to Measure Hard Drive and SSD Performance
1. AS SSD Benchmark

Tools to Measure Hard Drive and SSD Performance
AS SSD Benchmark is created especially for benchmark SSD drives. It’s another great tool used by hardware sites like AnandTech’s SSD benchmark charts (which also contains ATTO) to show their results. The app uses incompressible information so some SSD’s will reveal much lower scores than usual when they compress their information.
Test the sequential or random read/write performance with no cache. Furthermore, it performs the tests using 1 or 64 threads and it decides the SSD’s entry time. Two additional benchmark tests examine the drive’s behavior when copying a couple of large documents, a lot of small files, and a mixture of file sizes using cached copy functions of your OS in addition to reading/writing data based upon the data’s compressibility.
2. CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is a popular storage benchmarking tool since it is flexible and can produce fantastic results for virtually everything out of USB drives, to memory cards, RAMDisks, SSD drives and mechanical hard drives.
CrystalDiskMark was made to quickly test the performance of your hard drives.
Right now, the software allows us to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. This tool is a disk benchmark utility which measures performance for sequential and random reads/writes of various sizes for almost any storage device.
3. ATTO Disk Benchmark

Disk Benchmark for Windows
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a useful harddisk and SSD benchmarking tool.Several options are available to customize your performance measurement such as queue depth, overlapped I/O and just a comparison mode with the choice to operate continuously. Utilize ATTO Disk Benchmark to check any producers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and also detect that ATTO products will always offer the highest level of performance to your own storage.
The main features: This tool allows you to transfer sizes from 512KB to 8MB or more · Transfer lengths from 64KB to 2GB · Support for overlapped I/O · Supports a variety of queue depths · I/O comparisons with different test patterns · Timed mode allows continuous testing · Non-destructive performance measurement on drives that are formatted.
4. HD Tach

hd tach
Many benchmarks create a file on the hard disk and test inside that file. The issue is that modern hard drives utilize a zone bit recording method which enables different read speeds based on where the information is located. Information on the outside of the drive is much faster than data recorded on the inside.
HD Tach reads from places throughout the hard disk and reports a mean speed. In addition, it logs the read speeds to a text file which you can load into a spreadsheet and chart to read the results of the test. Along with successive read, HD Tach tests the drive’s random access time. Random access is the real measure of search speed. Many drive market sub 10 millisecond seek speeds, but search speeds are misleading.
5. Disk Thruput Tester

Disk Throughput Tester
Disk Throughput Tester is a freeware disk throughput benchmark program filed under benchmark software and made accessible from Object Software for Windows. This tool is portable, simple to use and also The evaluation file may be between 10MB and nearly 100GB using a block size to check of 1KB around 64MB.
6. DiskMark

DiskMark
DiskMark is a great tool to try because it shows lots of information about average, minimum, maximum and last read and write scores. Each of the information is set out in the raw variety format along with a live chart. The one slight issue with the tool is really configuring the test to perform.
You can clearly leave it in the default of 64KB chunks, at an 8MB test file that runs 320 times. To find another score such as using 1MB or perhaps 4KB blocks, you need to input the Chunk Size, then input the IOs. Incorrect installation will produce an extremely short inaccurate test or a test that takes much too long. Separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions are readily available.
7. QuickBench

QuickBench
QuickBench is an easy-to-use but effective hard disk performance benchmarking tool. It provides three built-in, business-trusted test suites that measure the performance of dozens of preset disk sizes. Complementing QuickBench’s built-in test suites is a custom test option that lets you design a disc test of just about any size and duration in accordance with your personal requirements.