Q What is disk benchmarking?

A The process of running tests on a disk to determine how fast it is.

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Disk benchmarking is the process of running software that accurately measures transfer speeds under various disk access scenarios (sequential, random 4K, deep queue depth etc.). The aim is to produce figures in MBps that summarize the speed characteristics of a disk. There are several free software options available which you can easily download and run yourself to benchmark your own drive. The oldest and most widely regarded by professionals is Iometer which has an extremely comprehensive set of features. For more casual users crystaldiskmark is very good choice as it allows you to quickly take the most common measurements with little configuration. AS-SSD is more recent and is designed, as the name suggests, specifically for SSD's. Even though there is nothing stopping you from running the AS-SSD tests on a regular drive, the tests will likely take a long time to complete.