How to test hard drive speed

[Amandev]

I have installed Hitachi 160 gb hard disk on my windows xp computer. I get problem while transferring data from my hard disk to external hard disk. Transferring speed is too low... Is there any way to check the hard drive speed. Any software or tool which allow user to check the speed of hard drive, the speed in which information is written to a platter.

[deoWo]

HDDs record data by magnetizing ferromagnetic material directionally, to represent either a 0 or a 1 binary digit. To speed up your hard disk speed we need to configure a special buffer in the computer's memory in order to enable it to better deal with interrupts made from the disk.The main way to decrease access time is to increase rotational speed, thus reducing rotational delay, while the main way to increase throughput and storage capacity is to increase areal density.

[RoninBlade]

Hard disk speed is the speed at which content can be read and written on a hard disk. Hard disk speeds vary by manufacturer, drive type, and use.Use the tool hdparm to set up better harddisk performance. hdparm is a command line utility for the Linux and Windows operating systems to set and view SATA and IDE hard disk hardware parameters. hdparm provides a command line interface to various hard disk ioctls supported by the stock Linux ATA/IDE device driver subsystem.

[Fabian]

If you are copying/pasting to the same drive the transfer rate will be about half the max transfer rate since the drive is trying to read and write different sectors simultaneously the same happens in opposite manner if you transfer data to the external hard drive from your hitachi hard drive.

[Killen]

Roadkil`s Disk Speed is a small and simple utility, that checks the read speed and access time of a selected disk drive and provides detailed statistics as well as an overall score. Advanced Disk Test is another option which is part of PerformanceTest, measures the data transfer speed when reading or writing data to one or more disks. The speed that data can be transferred between memory and a hard disk drive is one of a system's most important performance aspects. You can then compare your score with same model or similar drives. Standalone, no installation needed.

[Rawko]

Disk Bench will test your hard drive speed. The speed of your hard disk indirectly effects the performance of your internet connection too. Drive Speed Checker also allow use to check the hard disk speed, read, write, and search speeds of your drives.