tool to measure hard disk transfer rate?

[high_revs]

So my 256gb mSATA is coming soon. My plan is to put the OS and programs there, while keeping all "my documents" related items in the regular hard drive. the system currently has a 32gb mSATA right now but it's primarily used for Intel Rapid Start Technology (caching), which I'll replace with the 256gb mSATA.

What tools do y'all use for hard disk transfer rates? Just so I have a baseline.

[echoThreeOneSix]

fast copy will tell you in real time what is being transferred and how fast. are you doing it externally, or through the actual ports on the motherboard?

[Frisco3Gun]

Is this for a notebook? Don't recommend mSATA for a desktop. I'm assuming we are talking about a SSD anyway..

[Frisco3Gun]

If you can afford the bigger SSD, get that and forget about an mSATA

[d4v0s]

I have been pretty happy with HDTune myself. I use the trial all the time to diagnose bad drives, and I have the paid version on my desktop, laptop, and gaming rig.

[high_revs]

yes, notebook.

Is this for a notebook? Don't recommend mSATA for a desktop. I'm assuming we are talking about a SSD anyway..

msata is a form of SSD. why throw the 750gb hard disk space to lug files/archive around?

If you can afford the bigger SSD, get that and forget about an mSATA

will try that.

I have been pretty happy with HDTune myself. I use the trial all the time to diagnose bad drives, and I have the paid version on my desktop, laptop, and gaming rig.

[CGT80]

I am running win 8.1 and it shows the transfer rate when moving files. I am using a 256 gig plextor SSD that is mini SATA. The computer is a gigabyte brix desktop system, which is a mini computer. Everything in on the SSD. My personal data is on the desktop and documents, my photos, etc. All of those folders get backed up by windows to my external usb 3.0 hard drive. You could do the same and use the older drive as a backup.

Some people say not to use an SSD to store data. I only have 30 gigs of data to store and I like to have multiple copies and the transfer speed is fast with the SSD. I can cop to the external 1tb drive very quickly compared to the speed of the SATA drive that I had on my older desktop. Drives are getting cheaper all the time. My SSD was $240 a few months ago and not they are down to $159 on newegg. The 128 gig drive is actually more expensive than the 256, for now.

As long as your data is backed up, wearing out a drive or having a failure isn't the end of the world. My brix only had room to add one mini sata device as it is, so it was external or SSD in mini sata. If you have a lot of documents or big files, then maybe it would be better to run the HDD for that. I would still recommend an additional drive for automatic backup if you don't already have it. My other backup is on DVD's, just in case both hard drives fail.

The SSD's are great. The 10 second windows reboot is very welcomed.

[high_revs]

yeah.. my 256gb samsung 840 evo is $159 or $149. i probalby missed out on a hotter deal but only maybe by $10-$15. i don't store much data and so far, probably consuming only 100gb or so on hdd. but, i can carry more stuff with me by utilizing the 750gb hdd (just movies and stuff, things i can live w/o if hdd crashes since I can extract again and compress from bluray).

i'm quad backed up with 1 nas, one hdd connectted to my router (almost like a nas), and 2 external 2.5" drives. not all have same exact content but the core stuff like financials, data files, photos, etc. are quad copied.

the reason i was also asking for a tool is that i wanted to see if bios update was done so that sata3 can be recognized. i read some had to downgrade to 3 or 4 bios below to get sata3. not sure why this was but many have said downgrading bios to get sata3. else they were operating on sata2 only with the recent bios. hard to tell that by windows disk copy files.

for ex.. (found this tool also by the way called crystaldiskmark)

[orangeusa]

Passmark has lots of test tools check out SANDRA (open source).

Passmark is cheap and easy to use....

BTW - read up on SSD's. They are not mature and a small power glitch or 'non-graceful' shutdown can kill one. I don't have a link to the whitepaper, but it's no joke. Intel seems to be the only manufacturer who can make them more reliable than HDD's.

.

[the86d]

Boot to a Linux CD/DVD Live distro that can run from RAM.

Mount your drive:
mkdir /mnt/mount; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/mount
or
mkdir /mnt/mount; mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/mount
(if you installed windows from scratch.)

clear; date; dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/mount/scratch bs=1M count=2048; date

Windows like to do a bunch of BS in the background, for no apparent reason (well indexing and swapping when you are not doing anything at all, so Linux might give you a more accurate result.