Test Mac Hard Disk Read & Write Speeds With Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a hard disk benchmark test tool for Mac which deploys a classic method of determining hard drive read and write speeds; it fills free space with sample data to measure the total write speed, once data is written to the disk, it starts reading the data to evaluate disk read speed. It was developed to check if a user’s hard drive write and read speeds are suitable for working with high quality video editing and like tasks, including ultra high quality video playback, live encoding of HD videos, etc. Unlike other hard disk benchmark tools, it consistently performs write and read operations, so you can check both performance and reliability of your hard drive in real time.
Note: Blackmagic Disk Speed Test puts hard drive under extreme stress during data write and read operations, therefore it’s recommended to save your work before conducting the tests.
Before you start the hard drive read & write benchmark test, click Settings present in between write and read meters to specify target drive and load you want to put on your hard drive.
Once done, click the Start button to begin the read and write speed test. The main window displays the video qualities which are supported by your hard drive. For example, it puts tick mark under 10 Bit RGB 4:4:4 column for PAL And NTSC during testing, which means that hard drive will perform smoothly with that video quality and format. The How Fast? pane at right side lets you know about the read and write speed of high quality video formats.
Since it displays read and write speed tests in real time, you don’t have to wait for tests to complete to get statistics on your hard drive read and write performance. Apart from Stress level, it doesn’t come with any sort of configuration.
Applications like data compression utilities, high quality video players and encoders, etc., require high data write and read speed to work properly. That’s the reason why they often struggle with hard drives which are either not capable to read and write with ultra high speed or have driver related issues. With Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, you can easily check your hard drive speed for such high end video related operations. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test works on Mac 10.6 or later.
Get Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from Mac App Store
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App Store says download not available due to not being digitally signed.
I don’t know if that product needs administrative access to run, but if it does, it can’t and WON’T be allowed in the App Store. Any drive tool, such as Scannerz, TechTool Pro, or Drive Genius that does any form of surface scanning on the drive needs to access the system at a fairly low level which requires administrative access. Any programs that require administrative access are not allowed in the App Store, or at least not any that are fully functional.
With the release of Mountain Lion, the restrictions are even worse, and the code needs to be signed and the developer has to pay Apple $99 to “play.” I think this pay-to-play scheme will backfire. Apple is demanding too much control. Pretty soon the only thing available will be variations of Angry Birds and trivial programs.
Look outside the App Store for better programs, IMHO.
Is this incorrectly tagged as a “Windows article”?
Thankyou for pointing out. It’s been fixed.
For that matter, are there any suitable windows equivalents to this utility/benchmark? I think it’s really useful to size up your system’s I/O effective throughput.