The unit of measurement useful for monitoring the writing and reading speed of a hard disk is defined per MB per second ( MB / s), i.e.

The results returned by the program may also vary between disks of the same model, as they may also depend on the type of controller used ( IDE / SATA / RAID / SCSI / NVMe), disk fragmentation and CPU performance. In any case, rest assured, these are borderline situations. In this way, both in the case of HDD magnetic disks and in the case of SSD units, the program will measure the transfer times of these files, returning an overview of the speed and ability to work under stress of the unit.Īs reported on the official website, this system, if repeated intensively, can reduce the life of SSDs, as the program would overwrite entire GBs of data with each use. Works with both the classics internal and external mechanical hard drives (HDDs) with both the solid state drive (SSD) which also with USB sticks e SD cards, acting first in a manner sequential, then in mode random, going to overwrite a disk space with different sized test files. The operation of the software is very simple: after selecting which hard disk to run the test on, it will start testing the reading and writing capabilities.

The version portable can be started on all PCs that have at least Windows XP installed, while the one with the classic installer it does not work on Windows XP / 2003 computers. As already mentioned, Crystal Disk Mark is free and open source software, which was developed for computers with operating system Windows.

Crystal disk mark info