Recently I noticed my machine was getting a bit sluggish. It runs NT4 on a
NTFS disk. I looked around for a reliable way to test the disk speed but in
the end I wrote a simple program myself (attached).
It simply writes a big file and then reads it (using the unbuffered option
of CreateFile). The results were very interesting, my disk was running at 2
MB/s or less.
The NTFS disk was quite full and fragmented, so I cleared some space and
eventually got it defragged (not as easy as it sounds :-). The speed went up
to 8 MB/s for reads and my machine was no longer sluggish :-)
I thought other people would be interesting in trying the program on their
disks to see if they are getting the performance they expect. Just run
"disktest x:" where x is the drive letter you want to test. It creates a
100M temp file called disktest.tmp in the root directory which it deletes
when the test finishes.
You can capture the output using the normal method "disktest c: >
results.txt". Also attached is the source code so you can see what it does
and the results from my machine.
I have tested it on several machines and most disks run about 6-8 MB/s. I
would be interested in hearing if anyone gets better than 10 MB/s (and what
model disk so I can buy one :-)
I tried different BIOS settings and learnt some interesting things. Turning
off Prefetch slowed things a lot but the other options made no difference.
Of course NT uses its own drivers for the disk.
DiskTest.exe
Results.xls
