Downloading Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Free. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Thank you for using our Mac software portal. Unfortunately, there is no direct download for the Mac version of Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. To download the product, proceed to the App Store via the link below. Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. 1 BlackMagic Disk Speed Test. This is one of the best apps that you can use to perform a hard drive speed test on Mac. The features of the hard drive speed tester are: It has only one window. Requires a few simple settings. Compatible with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It shows write/read speeds in MB/second. If you are looking for a good hard drive speed test on Mac, feel free to use Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. It is free to download from the App Store, so take advantage of this tool whenever you need it. Geekbench 5 is a useful app for measuring the CPU performance and memory speed on your Mac. Nov 28, 2020 Download the latest version of Blackmagic Disk Speed Test for Mac for free. Read 9 user reviews and compare with similar apps on MacUpdate.
With today’s demanding applications on our computers, it’s important to ensure that there are no slow-downs or bottlenecks in the system. One area that has traditionally been an issue is the read and write speed of hard drives.
The advent of the SSD — or solid state drive — has led to a great improvement in read and write speeds (especially in comparison to older mechanical HDDs), but it’s still crucial to test transfer speeds to determine how efficient a system is and whether there might be any hardware or software problems.
And as we use more and more storage solutions on a daily basis, including USB storage, it’s also important to benchmark these devices too.
In this article we’ll examine the best speed test and benchmark software tools for your computer’s hard drive, supporting either SSD or HDD types of hard disks.
The ranking in the list below is in no particular order.
Table of Contents
1) ATTO Disk Benchmark
This is one of the leading benchmarking tools from a respected name. It will work on both HDD and SSD as well as RAID array disks. This makes it ideal for businesses and large companies that need to determine where there might be transfer speed issues in their systems.
Using a convenient interface where all of the relevant information is available in one window, ATTO Disk Benchmark remains a firm favorite with network technicians in the industry. It works on Windows OS but also there is a macOS version as well.
2) HDTach
What makes this application different from most other disk benchmarking tools is that it tests transfer speeds on all areas of the drive.
In hard disks, the data transfer speeds on the outside of the physical disk platter are higher than transfer speeds on the inside. This can distort the readings of transfer speeds.
What HDTach does is to use a VXD kernel mode to bypass the file system. It then accesses areas all over the disk and logs the transfer speeds in a file.
This results in a more accurate report on hard disk performance and provides much more relevant information.
3) MiniTool Partition Wizard
The MiniTool Partition Wizard is primarily aimed at users who need to resize, move, split, and format partition areas of their HDDs or SSDs. This allows the installation of multiple operating systems, for example.
It can also test disk transfer speeds on all drives, including both HDD and SSD. This makes it the ideal multi-purpose disk tool for system administrators and even power home users who need such an advanced tool.
The other good news is that it comes in a free edition, which does include the disk speed benchmarking tools.
4) UserBenchmark
This free, attractive tool allows for not just testing of hard drive and SSD speeds but also RAM, CPU and GPU speeds.
It will even test the transfer speeds of attached USB storage. This makes it the ideal companion for home users who are curious about system performance or need to identify a potential bottleneck within their systems.
It is a small download, is free to use, and presents all of the information in a very attractive interface that features graphical elements and color-coded benchmark logs.
Overall, this is a highly attractive piece of software that has proven to be very popular with many types of computer users.
5) Crystal Disk Mark
This small speed benchmarking utility is for users who just need to see speeds presented in a very simple way. Unlike other utilities, Crystal Disk does not contain any extra bells and whistles. What is unusual is that it also features an anime-themed edition called the Shizuku Edition.
This may suit people who just need a simple, free benchmarking utility that won’t take up much space and won’t confuse them with too much information on the screen.
6) My HDD Speed
Available from the long-lived and much-loved Majorgeeks website, this tiny utility allows people to see the speed performance of their HDDs in real time. Once again, this software does not contain too many extras that could become confusing for a user. It does one thing and does it very well.
At less than 150 KB, this is a tiny program that may suit users just looking to test their system speeds.
7) Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As the world is moving to better and bigger solid state storage, more benchmarking tools are supporting them.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has been designed to test both mechanical hard drives and SSDs but it really does do a great job on solid state drives specifically.
If you or your company have moved entirely to solid state drive storage, this is a tool that will run diagnostic and custom speed tests. Because it has been designed with solid state drives in mind, it is the ideal tool to use.
One feature that most other tools do not have is that Anvil’s tool displays both MB per second and IOPS when measuring the speed of disks.
8) AS SSD Benchmark
As with Anvil’s Utilities, this tool has been designed with solid state drives in mind. As we are now using more of them at home and in business, it’s also important to have a speed benchmarking tool that can provide up-to-date, relevant information on transfer speeds for this relatively new technology.
AS SSD Benchmark is small and comes in a free edition that allows anyone to get the most out of it before deciding to donate to support the developers. Since it doesn’t even need to be installed on a system and can be executed from a single file, this makes it ideal to carry around on a portable drive.
Like the previous tool, this one also measures the disk speed using MB /sec and also IOPS (input-output operations per sec).
9) jDiskMark
jDiskMark is a benchmarking tool that has been written in Java. Some years ago, Java was all the rage in the IT community but it has since become an outlier.
Having said that, the real advantage to Java is that it is cross-platform. This means that jDiskMark will even run on Linux and BSD-based systems as well as Windows.
It may be a small download, but jDiskMark features an easy-to-understand traditional interface that provides all of the information necessary.
10) PassMark Advanced Disk Test
This no-fuss benchmarking solution is ideal for those who need an uncluttered view of disk speed tests. It supports multiple threads; testing on different hard drives and SSDs can be done simultaneously using threaded processing.
This fast, efficient processing makes it the ideal choice for large-scale environments where testing of multiple storage sources needs to be done, including HDD, SSD, USB storage, RAID set-ups, SCSI storage, and networked drives.
11) Parkdale
Have you ever wanted to check the transfer speed of your CD-ROM drives in addition to your hard disk? Parkdale allows you to do that as well as test and benchmark speeds of hard disks, solid state drives, and even networked drives and servers.
What makes this small tool interesting is that all of that speed data can easily be compared to their benchmark test results page.
All you need to do is enter the device you’ve tested and then the value. This will log it and then compare it with other results that people have submitted, making it very easy to determine what speeds are normal.
12) Roadkil’s Disk Speed
If you have an older system that is before Windows 10, this tiny disk benchmarking tool may be for you. The interface is a no-fuss, no bells and whistles affair. It has the look of a Windows XP tool and in reality, it is possibly better for older systems.
13) HDDScan
If you have concerns about the overall health of your drive, the free HDDScan software is worth downloading.
As well as setting the speed of hard drives, USB storage, and solid state drives, it will also access and display S.M.A.R.T information.
This provides an indication of the overall physical health of the drive, including bad sectors and bad blocks. This is useful for knowing when a drive might be about to fail.
Whether you are experiencing a slow system, your programs are slow to start up, or you think that your attached drives could be about to fail, this tiny piece of free software can provide some peace of mind. It may even end up saving you from the loss of valuable data.
14) AJA System Test
Available for both Mac and Windows, this attractive piece of software is ideal for people who need an industry-recognized tool.
If you are in the graphic design or media industry and you rely heavily on computers for daily work, this tool is ideal.
All of the relevant information is presented in an attractive single-screen format with large color-coded graphics and easy-to-find options.
If you depend on fast PCIe transfer speeds, AJA System Test can also test the input-output speeds of these industry-standard cards.
Just bear in mind that you’ll need to pay for the full version to access this additional functionality.
Conclusion
As our Internet connection speeds have increased and our software applications have become bigger and more demanding of resources, it’s important to understand how fast your hard drive and solid state drive transfer speeds are.
This has implications in business because any slowdown can affect performance and delivery on a daily basis. This is why disk benchmarking tools are so important to the system administrator and even the curious home computer user.
Related Posts
Summary :
SD card is widely used in daily life, but do you really understand it? An overview of SD card, the methods to conduct SD card speed test on Windows PC/Android/Mac all the contents in this post. You are able to know which one is the fastest SD card by testing the SD cards by yourself with the given methods in MiniTool.
Quick Navigation :
An Overview of SD Card
Basics of SD card like its definition, features, application, category and others will be introduced in this part. So, if you’re not very clear about those or eager to know the related details, you shouldn’t miss this part.
About SD Card
SD card (Secure Digital) is a new generation of memory device based on semiconductor flash memory. It is a portable device, a proprietary non-volatile memory card format developed by SD Card Association. The SD card is widely used in portable devices such as digital camera, personal digital assistant (PDA), media player, etc.
-image from westerndigital.com
In 2000, these companies (Matsushita &Toshiba of Japan and SanDisDisk of the United States) launched the SD Association (Secure Digital Association), which has a strong lineup and attracted a large number of vendors. These vendors include IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, and others.
Driven by these leading manufacturers, SD cards have become the most widely used memory card in consumer digital devices. The SD card is a multi-functional memory card with large capacity, high performance, security and other characteristics.
It even has a password authentication function (SDMI specification) for data copyright protection than the MMC card, and the read/write speed is 4 times faster than the MMC card, up to 2M / second.
To know how to format and clone the SD card, read the next two articles:
SD Card Category
SD, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC are four primary card categories in the market. They have different features but with the same function – data storage. Next, I will explain them briefly one by one.
- SD: The second generation of Secure Digital (SDSC or Secure Digital Standard Capacity) cards was developed to improve the MultiMediaCard (MMC) standard, which keeps improving but in different directions. The Secure Digital changes the design of MMC in multiple ways from shape, thickness, capacity, transfer speed to content protection.
- SDHC: The Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) format was released in January 2006. It is defined in SD specification 2.0 version to support cards with 32 GiB (34,359,738,368 bytes) capacity at most. The SDHC trademark license is to ensure compatibility. The 2.0 version introduces the high-speed bus mode for both SDHC and SDSC. SDHC host devices only accept the older SD cards. However, the old host devices cannot recognize SDHC and SDXC cards though certain devices can do this by upgrading firmware.
- SDXC: The Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) format was released in January 2009. It is defined in the SD Specification version 3.01 and supports cards up to 2 TiB (2199023255552 bytes), while the SDHC card in the SD 2.0 specification is limited to 32 GiB. You may be interested in this post: SDHC VS SDXC – Which One Is Better for You?
- SDUC: The Secure Digital Extra-large Capacity (SDUC) format, described in the SD 7.0 specification, was announced in June 2018. It supports cards up to 128 TiB (140,737,488,355 328 bytes) at speeds up to 985 MB / s, regardless of form factor.
Micro or full size or interface type, including UHS-I, UHS-II, UHS-III or SD Express. SD Express interface can also be used with SDHC and SDXC cards.
Having known their respective features, you can choose a suitable card based on your demand. In this way, you will have a great experience on your devices.
If you would like to find a free partition tool for SD card, this post may be a wonderful reference for you: Best Free Partition Tool for SD Card – MiniTool Partition Wizard
Why and How to Test SD Card Speed
SD cards are applied in various applications ranging from cameras to phone, dashcams, and the Nintendo Switch. Whether the speed of SD card important? Obviously, the answer is absolute “Yes”.
You may see some SD card speed rankings on the Internet, but the fact that the fastest SD card must be the most suitable one you need is not always true. Price and availability are also important. Besides, whether your camera can make full use of SD card speed matters too.
In most cases, you can put a high-speed SD card into a slower camera, but it is not always available. What’s worse, you may sometimes buy a fake SD card or it doesn’t have the capacity and the speed as it claims.
But the good news is that you can test SD card speed with some free tools like MiniTool Partition Wizard, HD Tach, Crystal DiskMark, etc.
The following part will introduce SD card speed test on Windows PC/Android/Mac. So, if you would like to know the details of SD card benchmark, please read carefully.
SD Card Speed Test on Windows PC
SD card speed test on Windows PC is very easy through the Disk Benchmark feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard. You are able to test the transfer speeds under various disk access no matter in sequential or random.
Insert the SD card in your computer, then begin to test its speed with MiniTool Partition Wizard.
Step 1: Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to get its main interface, and then click on the Disk Benchmark feature in the toolbar.
Step 2: Select the drive letter of your SD card. Before clicking the Start button, you can set parameters on the Disk Benchmark window according to your demand. After that, click Start to continue the process.
Step 3: Wait for a while, all the results will show you in a chart form. Then you can check and analyze all the speed test results displayed in the chart.
Compare the test results with the speed printed on the SD card to see whether they have obvious difference. This is a great way to check whether it is a counterfeit SD card.
You may have an interest in this post: Hard Drive/SSD Speed Test with Best Free Disk Benchmark Software - MiniTool
SD Card Speed Test on Android
You wonder SD card speed test Android after knowing how to test its speed on PC. Don’t hurry! This section will tell you how to test SD card speed on Android.
Certainly, you need to download an SD card speed test tool like A 1 SD Bench or SD Card Test to check your SD card speed. All of them are free SD card test software.
After starting up the program, choose some parameters as you like on the applications to start the operation. Then, you will get all the results you want to obtain.
SD Card Speed Test on Mac
Hard Drive Speed Test Mac
SD card speed test on Mac is also available through some software, such as NovaBench, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. If you follow the instruction, you can acquire the SD card speed results.
NovaBench is a free SD card speed test tool for Mac operating system. It enables you to measure the read& write speed of disk and check the memory transfer speed, CPU, GPU speed and others.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is also a free disk test software applied for Mac operating system. It’s easy to use and has a high speed.
SD Card Speed Rating
After testing multiple SD cards, you may find their speeds are various. So, here comes the need of SD card rating. The speed rating enables you to classify SD cards’ speed clearly.
The SD Association has two UHS speed gratings, UHS speed grade 1 and UHS speed grade 3. UHS speed grade 1 supports a minimum write speed of 10MB / s, while UHS speed grade 3 supports a minimum write speed of 30MB / s. The UHS speed grade is usually represented by 1 or 3 inside the U symbol.
According to previous experience, cameras with 4K capabilities usually at least need a UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) class SD.
Disk Speed Test Mac Download
What you need to know is that the UHS Speed Level is different from the UHS BUS Speed. The UHS bus speed is expressed in Roman numerals I, II or III and represents the theoretical maximum read and write speed. However, unlike UHS speed grades, these are not sustained speeds.
Though the minimum speed is very important for the normal operation of the device (GoPro cameras often require UHS Speed Class 3), the maximum speed should not impact the operation of the device, but may shorten the time required to download material from the SD card.
In general, a UHS Speed Rating SD card is enough. The higher UHS Speed card could be expensive and not necessary.
Memory card manufacturers usually measure the speed of their cards in megabytes per second or MB/s (or MBps, both in uppercase letter 'B'). However, the video recording bit rate is usually measured in megabits per second or Mb / s (or Mbps, lowercase letter 'b'). They are not the same.
A byte has 8 bits, so from megabits per second to megabytes per second, you multiply by 8. So 80MB / s is the same as 640Mb / s. This is a convenient conversion calculator.
To sum up, there are three points you need to pay attention to:
- Make sure your card shows a “UHS Speed Class of 3” indicating the card with a minimum read & write speed of 30 MB/ second.
- The SD card is formatted as FAT32 (32GB or smaller) or exFAT (larger than 32 GB)
- You can use the given methods to confirm your SD card speed, because the counterfeit SD card is also available even it doesn’t achieve the speed printed on the card.
Conclusion
Read here, you may have a clear understanding of SD card speed test on Windows PC/Android/MAC and some additional information about SD card. If you want to do the SD card speed test, just choose a suitable one from the given methods according to your situation.
With some free tools like MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can do the SD card benchmark easily. In this way, finding a suitable SD card for your device would be rather simple.
If you have any good idea about SD card speed test, you can share with us. We would appreciate it if you leave any suggestion or comment by sending an email to [email protected].
SD Card Speed Test FAQ
The speed class rating (Class 2, 4, 6 and 10) of SD cards is set based on the standardization of data transfer speeds by the SD Card Association (SDA). The specific speed class rating has its own data transfer speed.
- Class 2: the minimum write speed is 2MB/s or higher.
- Class 4: the minimum write speed is 4MB/s or higher.
- Class 6: the minimum write speed is 6MB/s or higher.
- Class 10: the minimum write speed is 10MB/s or higher.