How to know the speed of your ssd with these programs?

Without a doubt one of the most important components of our computer is the SSD where we have the operating system and our programs. It does not matter if we have the best processor on the market or the best graphics card, if you have a slow or bad solid state drive, your PC will jerk or take a long time to load the programs. Therefore, we bring you this basic guide with the 4 most used programs to know the speed of your SSD.

When performing all these speed tests, we will see two key concepts, sequential and random read / write. As its name indicates, an operation with sequential access is one in which the data that is read or written to the disk is followed, that is, consecutive one after the other. This process is performed with very large files, which occupy several sectors or data cells.

On the other hand, a random access operation is one in which the data to be read is distant from each other, scattered in different areas of the disk. This occurs when reading many small files, or doing different tasks at once, that require accessing data from different places on the drive.

We want to warn you that it is not advisable to repeat the tests unnecessarily, since, every time we carry out one of them, we are shortening the useful life of our SSD. Remember, use these programs only if necessary.

Index of contents

CrystalDiskMark, the best option to see the speed of your SSD

CrystalDiskMark is a small reference utility that allows us to quickly know the sequential and random read / write speeds. Measures Q32T1 sequential read / write speed, and random 4KiB Q8T8, 4KiB Q32T1, and 4KiB Q1T1

To use CrystalDiskMark is very simple:

• Download CrystalDiskMarkSelect the SSD you are going to test. (Green box) Set the number of times the test will be run and its size. Here we recommend setting it to run once and do the 8gb test to match it to an actual usage reading. (Red and blue box). Start the test by pressing "All". (Black box).

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD Benchmark is a classic tool that indicates the speeds of the SSD and the capacities of the controller of this (without using the cache of the operating system). Composed of six tests in which the reading and writing of a 1GB file is measured (Seq test), as well as 4K blocks randomly (4K), 64 threads (4K-64Thrd) and the latency of SSD access (Acc.time).

On the other hand, it examines the behavior of the drive when copying large files, small files and a mix of various file sizes using the caching functions of the operating system (Copy-Benchmark), as well as the read and write performance of data compression (Compression-Benchmark).

To use AS SSD Benchmark you only have to select the hard disk you want to analyze (1), the test size (2) and click on “start”. Finally we would have an overall score of our SSD performance.

Anvil's Storage Utilities, very complete test to know the speed of your SSD

We continue with Anvil's Storage Utilities, this application gives us the possibility to monitor the read and write speed, collect details about the system using the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), as information about the different hard drives we have, partitions, volumes, etc.

Apart from the above mentioned functions, this tool allows you to opt for a standard SSD performance test (Seq 4MB, 4K, 4K QD4 / 16, 32K, 128K) in which it collects all the information about the read and write performance, run the tests separately and a stress test in which the integrity of the SSD is checked.

We download Anvil's Storage Utilities, we run it and we simply have to select the SSD (if we don't, the test will run wherever the downloaded program is), press "Run", and after finishing, we will have all the detailed results of each test together to an overall score.

Atto Disk Benchmark

Finally, Atto Disk Benchmark, this program goes beyond the previous ones, allowing us to even analyze SSD in RAID. It brings three very simple options in which the benchmark is performed without the operating system providing any help to the SSD (Direct I / O), omitting the cache writing and data verification (Bypass Write Cache), finally, it checks the unit for errors (Verify Data).

After registering on their website and having installed it, using it is very easy, we choose the disk we want to stress (Drive), we put 8gb as the file size (File Size), we select "Direct I / O" (in the case you want liken the benchmark to the real use of the day to day) and press "Start". Little by little, the stress test will be carried out and the results will be reflected in the form of a graph, where the lower point of 512B points to the upper point of 64MB.

This ends our guide to programs with which you can find out the speed of your SSD, if you have any suggestions, do not hesitate to leave it in the comments.