Hard Drive Speed Testing

[DaveLembke]

I bought myself a OCZ 90GB SSD SATA III

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227757


to replace my Seagate 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s drive which is SATA II ( *in which this SATA III drive will be running SATA II 3.0Gb/s vs 6Gb/s until I either upgrade my motherboard with one that has SATA III port(s) or pick up a SATA III drive controller for $40 )and want to compare before and after speed of data read/write at my current SATA II configuration.

 I have been searching the web for a good speed test utility for data read/write through SATA II and the best match I found so far was this site below. BUT the only utility that works ( sort of ) is Parkdale. Reason why I say it sort of works is because when using it and nothing else running to affect the read/write speed of the hard drive each test gave me different results every time I ran it and with different file sizes to read and write I still could not find a setting that would on multiple testing display somewhat similar results. It seems like the results fluctuated too wildly for me to assume that they were good numbers.

I tried to initially go to Windows 7 Device Manager to find this drive controller speed test feature that I never knew existed in 7, and my Windows 7 Home Premium doesn't have such a feature available. Maybe the more expensive/featured editions of Win 7 have this feature and Home Premium is lacking it.

http://ttcshelbyville.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/test-your-hard-drive-speed-with-windows-7s-device-manager/

Results I got from Parkdale displayed for the Seagate 500GB a speed of 60.8 MB/s Write and 68.2 MB/s Read. The SSD was showing 85MB/s Write and 101MB/s read. But the numbers fluctuated between tests and nothing else running under all file read/write sizes selected. ( *Seagate 500GB has 114GB free space and is not fragmented )

Shouldn't my SATA II speeds be way faster than this? Thats another reason why I feel the numbers are incorrect and I need a better utility for testing than parkdale! I also looked into if there was driver updates for my motherboards drive controller and I have the latest ( or I should say the LAST update available for this board from 2009 )

My hardware is:

Biostar MCP6PB M2+ ver 6.0 Motherboard http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=387&tab=6
Athlon II x4 620 AM3 CPU 95watts http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103706
2 x 2GB  - DDR2 800Mhz Corsair (Matched gaming pair of Ram with the aluminum heatsinks) ( 4GB Total Ram *3GB accessible)
Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit ( * Yah I have to upgrade to 64-bit to get 1GB of my Ram back with the 3GB Cap, that's my next project on my list.)

Hopefully this is the correct location to post this as for its inquiring about hardware speed testing using software.

Thanks

[Geek-9pm]

The numbers may not be wrong. Doing a speed test and a performance test are not always the same thing. Speed can be a single thing, how fast does it transfer data. Or how fast does it find random sectors.

Performance test is much more subjective.  It is an estimate of how the driven will perform a rel-world scenario. It can be the average of several tests that do practical operations.

In a real-world case the drive will be partially fragmented.