How to measure disk-performance under Windows?

Question

I'm trying to find out why my application is very slow on a certain machine (runs fine everywhere else). I think i have traced the performance-problems to hard-disk reads and writes and i think it's simply the very slow disk.

What tool could i use to measure hd read and write performance under Windows 2003 in a non-destructive way (the partitions on the drives have to remain intact)?

Answer 1

Edit: As pointed out by Hugo, HD Tach has been end of lifed. HD Tune appears to be equivalent: http://www.hdtune.com/

---

There's a piece of software called HD Tach, which is well respected and more importantly, shows pretty graphs like this:

Answer 2

IOMeter will do this. It can do non-destructive testing by writing to its own files within the partitions.

Answer 3

You can use Perfmon to gather physical disk based counters, such as:

• Physical Disk (instance)\Disk Transfers/sec counter for each physical disk

• Physical Disk(instance)\% Idle Time

• Avg. Disk Queue Length

Or download PAL (very useful monitoring tool) and use the built-in template targeting the OS.

Answer 4

The performance counters in windows can show you transfer-speeds, current disk queue etc in order to trace the actual bottleneck on the machine when your app is running.

Look at Performance Object: Physical Disk

And look especially at the queue-counters. A disk can be very fast ad sequential reads, but as soon as it tries to access the disk simultaneously the queue might peak and give you horrible performance.

Answer 5

Try with Harddisk benchmark programs: http://www.hdtune.com/ http://www.passmark.com/products/pt_advdisk.htm

Answer 6

Besides graphical tool if you want an elaborate output to analyze the performance of your partition or hard disk, there is a nice tool called sqlio(from microsoft). The tool is CMD based, but does an awesome job when it comes to IO testing. Refer: Windows Disk Performance test