Testing Hard Drive and Memory Card Speed

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.steelbytes.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.steelbytes.com/</a><br /><br /></div>I'm doing some speed tests on a few different brands of 512 MB Secure Digital cards, and I needed to come up with a good way of testing them. I discovered a tool last year called HD_Speed, and it does exactly what you think: it allows you to test both reading and writing speeds of any drive attached to the system: hard drives, optical drives, and flash memory cards. The developer was even kind enough to alter the program for me to add a new feature that would make my testing even easier. If you're a stats junkie, download this app - and, even better, it's free! Look under the "Disk Utils" section to grab it.

[Suhit Gupta]

Wow, a really neat and simple application to use. I just downloaded it onto my laptop and ran the test. My super slow laptop has a score of 7.3 MB/s. It would be nice to have this as part of the Windows Task Manager. Once I get to my desktop, I will be able to test my SD card.

Suhit

[Steven Hughes]

HD_Speed is a good program for both sustained and burst data read/write transfer rates tests with a cool real time graph, I have been generally using this as well as Sandra( http://www.sisoftware.net/ ) for most hardware benchmarking for a while.

Also to note Sandra now has a benchmarking program for Smartphone and Pocket PCs, memory cards,Smart Card and SIM cards support as well for 2004. They have a cool Endurance factor estimation in Flash Benchmark as well...

http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=news&location=2004sp1_release&langx=en&a=

You can download it from here:

http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_x86&langx=en&a=

:D

[backpackerx]

Jason, is there any way we could create a user data base of card speeds? I know I'd love this information especially after reading a while back how most of the low end flash memory like Viking and Kingston were reading and writing faster than my Sandisk cards. (I haven't been too impressed with Sandisk overall)

[Jason Dunn]

Jason, is there any way we could create a user data base of card speeds? I know I'd love this information especially after reading a while back how most of the low end flash memory like Viking and Kingston were reading and writing faster than my Sandisk cards. (I haven't been too impressed with Sandisk overall)

Hmm...yes, perhaps we could do that. My developer resources are stretched pretty thing right now though. Anyone out there good at whipping up a simple database and a graphing GUI?