What are some activities I can do to measure the top performance of my hard drive?

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My computer ueses a 7200 rpm hard drive since 2011, and the last year, it feels like drive performance has gotten sluggish and choppy.

I would like to measure the peak performance of my drive, expressed in MB/s. It's my understanding that a 7200 rpm drive will at most peak at ~150MB/s (not sure if that's R, W, or R/W at the same time).

Is there a certain activity, like reading or writing a certain type of file, that would enable me to monitor the situation where the drive is theoretically supposed to be able to reach its maximum performance?

I'm thinking that this doesn't necessarily mean "peak" performance (as in a spike), but rather a sustained top performance over some time. Since the drive is a bit choppy and erratic, I would like to understand if there are variabilities of some sort.

Winterflags

Posted 2016-09-03T13:46:08.553

Reputation: 958

Your hdd has a spinning media like a record, the outer track has the most data, and each track in has less, and less. As you go inward you have to jump grooves more frequently, and the data transfer gets less and less until you reach the inner most track. – cybernard – 2016-09-04T16:12:31.530

@cybernard Good information, but does it relate to my question in a practical way? – Winterflags – 2016-09-04T16:26:54.243

Answers

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You can use the free version of HDtach to check the performance of your drive. Frequently, the answer to performance issues on your hard drive is your hard drive is slowly dying.

You could use spinrite(cost money) from grc.com to scan your whole drive, and monitor the ECC correction counts, and bad sectors.

Also you could use mhdd(free), from http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

It will tell you how fast it can read each sector. They are color coded to indicate how slow each block is. Large numbers of sectors not in the 1st 2 time categories(greater than approx 14ms), are indications your hard drive is near death.

Get a new hard drive,or better yet an SSD.

cybernard

Posted 2016-09-03T13:46:08.553

Reputation: 11 200

Are there any activities I can do that doesn't rely on a program or utility? Like just writing lots of zeroes to a file and see what top speed I get? – Winterflags – 2016-09-04T17:57:47.660

Even that would require a program or utility. – cybernard – 2016-09-04T19:28:41.020

1You could copy and paste a large file from one location to another time it, and divide size/time=speed. However, fragmentation, location on drive, and other factors can bias this number. – cybernard – 2016-09-05T01:15:52.420

Asked: 2016-09-03T13:46:08.553

Viewed: 41 times

Active: 2016-09-04T17:10:59.467