Drive Speed

Testing your computer’s performance from time to time is essential for keeping your system in top shape. For example, you may want to check a drive’s speed once in a while and compare it to what’s written in the product specification.

If you see that your drive is slower than it’s supposed to be, then there might be something wrong with it.

Drive Speed is a Java app that does exactly what it says: determines both the writing and reading speed of a disk drive. It does this by writing a temporary file (with all zero bytes) on the disk you select. You can do this on an HDD, SSD or flash drive, but the one partition which the program won’t test is the system drive.

We're not sure why the app cannot write a temporary file on the system drive, and this could be considered a drawback since there are many other free tools out there which can do this. But apart from that, Drive Speed does a pretty good job.

While the program is nothing special when it comes to looks (as you’d probably expect from Java software), it compensates when it comes to usability. The interface is simple and intuitive, giving you very few options so you don’t get confused by all sorts of benchmarking stats and terms you may not even be interested in.

You have to remember that, when you test a drive speed, you first have to select a temporary file size that is larger than your computer's RAM. Also, when you test a flash drive, you must check the “prompt before reading” option if you wish to obtain a read speed as well.

While Drive Speed may not be the most advanced benchmarking tool, it can be a very helpful program if you only need to perform a quick and accurate disk speed testing.