Benchmark SSD & Hard Drive Performance with Disk Speed Test for Mac OS X

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Want to compare hard disk performance or see just how big of a speed difference that SSD upgrade had? Grab the free Disk Speed Test tool from the Mac App Store, it’s a quick and simple way to measure drive performance. The app works by creating large blocks of temporary data that are written to the drive and then read, allowing for a consistent benchmark across multiple Macs or disks. The UI is easy to understand and there’s no frills, just launch the app and the test starts.

Download Disk Speed Test free from the Mac App Store

It’s not exactly scientific, but it’ll give you a good idea of performance changes with upgrades or different disks, just note the read and write speeds both before and after an upgrade, or have your friends run it on their Mac to test speeds across drives.

For example, a MacBook Air might write to an SSD at around 180mb/sec and read at 220mb/sec, whereas a standard 5400 RPM drive in a MacBook Pro may only write at 45mb/sec and read at 60mb/sec. Many third party SSD’s perform even better than the MacBook Air, and these kind of numbers really drive home the day-to-day performance boost you’ll see with an SSD upgrade. If you’re in the market for one, check out the deals on SSD drives at Amazon and get yourself an early Christmas present.

12-16-11

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