When you install a new piece of hardware on your computer, how do you know that it runs any faster than the one it replaced? If its something like a graphics card, you can usually see obvious results when playing games. However, if you upgraded to a new hard drive, you’d have to analyze read and write times, which aren’t always easy to compare. What you need is a good benchmarking tool, which can give you a nice set of standardized results.

DiskMark is a free utility that will measure the performance of your hard drive. You can select the file sizes that you wish to test with, and the amount of runs you would like it to make. It will then output the average read and write speeds, along with the highest and lowest of each.