Testing – HD Tune Pro
HD Tune Pro is one of the most popular hard drive software suites available. It has many different benchmarks and tests built into it.  Our first test is the read benchmark, which tests the average read speed and access time of the drive.

I was a little taken back by the low results here, but this has to do with the Everest 2 controller.  HD Tune uses a single request for their benchmark tests and as you can see from the read results above and write results below they are way below the advertised speeds.  This is really where the Everest 2 platform fails, and it is very apparent in the Agility 4.

Now we have the Random Access test.  This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed. Here are both the results from the write random access test.

We normally like the see 5000 and over in the 4K test.  You can see that it exceeded that.

In HD Tune Pro 5.0 the file benchmark is actually 2 tests now.  The first is the normal file benchmark we are used to see that tests different transfer speeds over specific file lengths.

As you can see the drive does well, but the read speeds sort of drop off.  This is going to take some more investigation, which we will do on the next 2 pages.

The newly added file benchmark also tests a file size (500MB for our test) and gives you sequential read and write speeds.  It also gives you IOPS for 4KB random single and 4K random multi.

HD Tune also has a set of extra tests.  Here are the results of those for both read and write.