Drive Sector Tester

Drive Sector Tester is a feather-light application you can use to run hard disk benchmarks and get an assessment of drive reading speeds. It's evidently geared toward PC users experienced with such software. However, it contains straightforward options.

The entire tool's wrapped in a single .exe file that can be dropped in any part of the HDD or copied to a USB flash drive, in order to run Drive Sector Tester on any machine. Just keep in mind that you must have .NET Framework installed. It doesn't make any changes to the Windows registry or create files on the disk without your approval. Administrative rights are required to avoid disk scan errors.

As far as the interface is concerned, the app's packed in a standard window that shows all options available. It doens't put too much emphasis on appearance.

Once it autodetects all your disk drives, including removable, CD, DVD and network partitions, it gives you the possibility to view their labels, filesystem, amount of sectors, along with total and free space.

After selecting the target drive, you can specify sectors to index, choose the preferred block size, and click a button to start the scanner. This may take a long time, depending on the size of the partition.

During the task, you can check out the current, average and maximum recorded reading speed (MB/s) in real time, find out the current sector, position and read size, as well as cycle through four viewing modes related to the speed and grid. Unfortunately, there aren't options implemented for copying, saving or printing these statistics or the grid.

To sum it up, Drive Sector Tester comes loaded with intuitive options for performing HDD benchmarks to discover reading speeds.