We know that disk speed is an important performance component of a development machine.
I'd like to understand how the multiple drives in my Windows Vista machine compare. Vista will give me a performance index for the system but what's a good (preferably free) benchmarking tool for measuring each drive's performance?
Disk Bench is basic but free, and will probably do everything you need. There's probably a host of other tools out there, but it did the job for me in the past.
Hi
Try diskTT, it's small and free benchmarking application for disk drives. Here you can find some usage reports on it.
As usual, you should try with different test file sizes in order to mimic the normal usage of your system/application. Some apps use many small files, other some very large, and the resulting access speed can vary dramatically.
Get a Linux live CD (there's a few) that has bonnie and hdparm installed. Boot it up and run hdparm in read only mode on each of your drives.
The advantage of using a live CD is that you remove the overhead that Windows adds (swap, background processes, etc) which you can never truly stop. Bonnie is used to test filesystem performance not disk performance. Both are useful tools.
HDTune, that is used in many review sites, has also a free version (for personal use)