CrystalDiskMark: How to Measure SSD or Hard Drive Performance

How good is your hard drive or SSD?

currently all PCs include SSD drivesthis unit has become a standard to win speed and security when storing the data. But even so, it is recommended to carry out an analysis to verify the integrity of your storage unit, be it an SSD or a mechanical disk. For this you can use CrystalDiskInfo, but this software developer also has a utility that allows you to measure the performance of the SSD or Hard Drive to verify that it meets your requirements. Let’s see how to do it in a few easy steps with CrystalDiskMark.

With this utility we can also see if our hard drive, be it SSD or mechanical, has a fault. When we test the performance of our storage unit and it is not ideal, there is a problem. We can also use CrystalDiskMark to verify that we have installed the drive correctly and it has the specified speed, especially on faster M.2 SSD drives that use PCI Express 4.0. If all is well it should meet specifications from the manufacturer in terms of read or write speed.

Another use is to be able to see the reading and writing speed of each unit that we have installed in our PC. We can use the fastest for the operating system and the rest for other tasks that are less important or require less disk speed. The latest games demand a lot of space and in a drive that is fast, we can choose the best one for install our library of games and get the most out of it.

CrystalDiskMark, like CrystalDiskInfo, is free software that we can download from the developer’s website. Let’s see how to download and use it by following these steps.

Download and Install CrystalDiskMark

It’s very easy to check how your storage unit is doing with this software, but if you don’t have it installed, let’s see how to do it:

1. Go to the CrystalMark website and click CrystalDiskMark software to download it, you can also download it directly from here.

   

2. Once in our downloads folder, we do double click to run it.

   

3. We accept the license agreement and click on Nextselect the route and click on Next to continue.

   

4. we put a Name for the Start menu and if we want create a shortcut on the desk.

   

5. Now we only have to click on Install and wait for finish the installation.

   

6. At the end it will ask us if we want to open the application directlywe can say yes and measure the performance of our drive right away.

   

With the utility already installed and executed, we only have to see how we can measure the performance of our hard drive, whether it is a mechanical drive or SSD.

Measure SSD or HDD performance

CrystalDiskMark interface is very easy to usebut at the same time it has several options that will allow you to customize the tests carried out, offering many possibilities, either for your mere curiosity or also to carry out exhaustive tests and check the actual performance of a particular configuration.

if simply you want to run a quick standard testyou can click on All, a green button located at the top left, it will immediately start performing the tests with the most usual parameters.

When finished it will show you the results of the 4 tests executed in both reading and writing. The manufacturer’s specifications should be similar to the results of the first test, where sequential read and write speeds are measured and generally usually offers the fastest speed that the storage unit may have.

But let’s see how customize tests and even how to run only one of them with the different options that CrystalDiskMark allows us.

If we look at the interface, we will see different dropdowns that we can modify, right next to the button all we will find a 5 that we can change for another value from 1 to 9, this is the number of tests that will be carried out of each of the available ones. right next door, and in ISO/IEC 80000-1 measurement (similar to the international system, but in base 2), we will find the size of the test to perform that we can modify from 64 Mebibytes to 64 Gibibytes.

The next option is the unit to perform the test on, it is simple if you only have one unit, but if you have several you can select the one you want to measure the performance from, you can choose any storage drive connected to your PC or a folder on your drive. In addition, it provides you with information on the occupied and total space, as well as the percentage of free space, yes, in accordance with ISO/IEC 80000-1. Finally, you will find the unit to measure the performance, by default we will find MB/s (Megabyte per second), but we can change to GB/s, IOPS or µs.

But in addition to these customizable options, we have a menu where we can choose other options, such as configuring the tests to perform random tests or filling everything with zeros.

If we click Setting we find this option inside Test data, it also allows us to select the unit we want to evaluate or a complete configuration to select the type or size of the block among others. It is better not to touch these options if we do not know what we are doing. If you have modified any you can always return to the default values ​​by clicking on Default.

On the menu profile we can select different profiles to show the results that interest us. We can choose peak performance, Demo or a test with mixed results.

Within Theme You can choose different display options, from zoom to see it in a larger size, as well as colors and dark themes that users like so much. The next menus are help and language, which is available in many of them.

You can also run just one of the tests by clicking on the specific button. If we only want to execute a read test + Mix SEQ1M Q8T1 (1 Mebibyte sequential test with 8 queues and one thread) we will click on the first button just below the one that executes all. We can also stop it when we are interested by clicking on the corresponding Stop.

Check how your SSD or HDD is working

With this simple software you can check How is your storage unit performing?You can also detect problems if you see that the data is not consistent with the type and speed of your disk. you will be able to see How is your new M.2 SSD going? faster than you just bought or just check that the manufacturer is not cheating you.

Simply install CrystalDiskMark and follow the steps in this guide to see what speed, or any other value you’ve configured, has your primary, gaming, or new PCIe 4.0 SSD capable of the full speed of this interface. You can too check the speed of external storage driveseven from memory cards.

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