Good OS X Hard Drive Benchmark

Question

What software can provide some insight on the performance of the hard drive in my MacBook Pro? I would be interested in both sequential and random read and write performance.

This is in the context of understanding the improved performance of a solid state disk upgrade. Besides things just generally feeling snappier, I would like to provide my colleagues with quantitative measurement of how much faster the ssd drive is or isn't.

Solution 1

XBench is the de facto standard for Mac benchmarking - and it covers not just the hard disk, but almost every measurement metric on a computer.

Solution 2

What kind of benchmarks are you looking for specifically?

Applications like QuickBench can tell you a lot more information about how well the disk performs.

While applications such as AJA System Test (included with any of their drivers - so just choose any of the Kona products and install or extract it using Pacifist) can tell you how suitable the hard drive is for video performance (namely high bandwidth without dropping frames).

While XBench can give you some disk performance tests it's nowhere near as comprehensive or useful as those seen in QuickBench or even AJA System Test.

Comments

[Erv Walter]

XBench gave me what I wanted.

[Erv Walter]

These were useful, but appeared to mostly be different angles on looking at throughput (MB/s). XBench gave me a good enough view of that for my needs. I wished for a tool to give latency for random reads, but none of them seem to do it.

[daviesgeek]

+1 AJA System seems to work really well! It is really lightweight and gives you important info, but doesn't give you sooo much info that you are wading in charts of information.

[Brian Carlton]

AJA link is dead (August '12)

[Asclepius]

QuickBench isn't exactly free, is it? Not sure if it's worth the expensive, since XBench is free.