GRC Readspeed : GRC's Hyper-accurate mass storage read-performance benchmark

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Steve Gibson while working on Spinrite 6.1 created a very useful drive benchmark took called Readspeed.

Quote

 

ReadSpeed is the most accurate benchmark of PC mass storage ever created. It has measurement stability and repeatability of greater than 4 significant digits – better than 1 part in 10,000, or 0.01%.

 

After you use ReadSpeed on your own system, you may have questions such as: Why is the end of my spinning hard drive half the speed of the front? Why does the end of my SMR-formatted drive show impossibly high performance? Why is the front of my SSD so much slower than the rest and why are there places where it virtually stalls? Are these problems? Should I worry? Is it possible to fix these things?

 

 

It's a very cool tool to run on your hard drive to see if your drive is having issues.

 

He has a video of it in action on his website

 

https://www.grc.com/readspeed.htm

 

I've personally used it myself. I was working on a customer's laptop one night and the Hard drive performance was in the toilet.

To give you an idea of the slowness, I was going to create a 2H2 Windows 10 ISO. After the download had finished it started to create the ISO and it took over 1 hour when it normally just takes a couple of mins.

I checked the smart data and it had a clean bill of health (That's not to say there wasn't still a bad sector(s) on the drive.

He had not used the laptop in a while and it still had windows 10 version 1709. So I was going to format and reinstall windows.

This would give him the newest version of windows, plus see if the reinstall makes things go any faster.

But then I thought, let me first run Readspeed on the hard drive and see what kind of performance it currently has.

The results were in.

 

As you can see around the 50% mark the speed peter pan's off a cliff and does not trail down gently as expected.


Seeing those numbers I said screw it and sent him out to Walmart to get an SSD. After the SSD the system ran much better (Obviously)

Very handy little tool.

I also ran it on a 750GB 2.5 inch hard drive I had laying around and it was a
A MUCH more gradual decline in speed, at 50% it was still in the 80's.