How to Detect MB/s of Hard Drive on Windows 11, 10, 8, and 7

When a computer running slow, you may need to check the MB/s of hard drive. This tutorial will show you how to check HDD read-write speed easily.

Posted by @Dervish May 6, 2024 Updated By @Dervish May 12, 2023

What does the MB/s of hard drive stand for?

As we all know, a hard drive is a hardware component that stores computer data. A user's documents, pictures, music, videos, applications, and the operating system all represent the data stored on the hard drive. The hard drive can be an external hard drive or an internal hard drive.

The read/write speed of a hard drive is one of the conditions to measure its performance. Read speed refers to the time it takes the device to open the target file, and write speed refers to the time it takes to save the target file to the device.

When you look at the numbers for hard drive speed, you'll notice a peculiar unit - MB/s. MB/s means megabytes per second and refers to the number of bytes transferred per second. For example, a device with a write speed of 32 MB/s means it can record 32 megabytes of data per second.

Tip: Don't confuse MB/s with Mb/s. Mb/s is megabits per second and refers to the number of bits transmitted per second.

How to detect MB/s of hard drive from Task Manager

Because the read and write speed of the hard drive is an important factor affecting the performance of the computer. So, when the Windows running slow, we usually check the MB/s of hard drive, if the HDD read-write speed is too slow, then we need to take some measures to make it run faster.

If you are using Windows 10 and above, then you can detect MB/s of hard drive from Task Manager.

Step 1. On the desktop, enter “Task Manager” in the search bar and open it.

Step 2. After open the Task Manager, browse to the “Performance” option.

Step 3. Select the hard drive you want to check from the list. Now, you can see the current hard drive performance status, including read and write speed.

Warning: If MB/s of hard drive are not detected from Task Manager on Windows 10, it may be Performance option is disabled. So, you need to enter diskperf -Y in CMD to enable it. Task Manger only provides some basic data about hard drive speed. If you want to know more, you should try other ways.

Check MB/s of hard drive with a comprehensive disk speed tester

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a powerful disk speed tester. It is not only very easy to use, but also provides more comprehensive and detailed test results. Users can export test results to analyze the status of hard drives and make targeted optimizations. Whether testing the external hard drive speed, or an internal hard drive speed, it can do it easily.

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This utility provide two testing modes: Simple Mode and Pro Mode. Please download the Demo version to see how to detect MB/s of hard drive with AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Step 1. Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant, then launch it.

Step 2. On the main interface, click "Test" and select "Disk Speed Test".

Step 3. The default mode is Simple Mode, it is similar to Task Manager. But you can click "Pro Mode" to get a more comprehensive test.

Step 4. In the new window, you can change various default parameters including Partition, Average/Maximum speed, Size, Test Number and Duration. After setting all the parameters, click “Start” to perform the speed test.

Note: There are two test types: Random and Sequential. The block size varies from 4KB to 8MB. Queue number can be selected from 1to 512. Thread number ranges from 1 to 64.

Step 5. After the test is over, you can click "Export" to export the test results.

The above content introduces two methods to detect MB/s of hard drive. Task Manager is more convenient but provides limited data. AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is more comprehensive, and it can also help you if you want to improve HDD read write speed.

How to speed up hard drive read and writing speed

If you are not satisfied with the test results, how to speed up hard drive performance?

In general, there are many reasons to cause a computer running slow. But disk fragmentation and system drive almost full are the main reasons. If your system drive not enough space, we can easily solve it with AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

App Mover is a popular feature that can move installed programs/folders on the system drive to another to reduce the used space on the system drive. You can refer to the following steps:

Step 1. On the main interface of the tool, click "Free up" > "App Mover".

Step 2. Choose App Mover or Mover Folders according to your needs. Then, follow the operation guide.

Tip: If you don't have removable programs/folders on your system drive, you can also use allocate free space from one partition to another to extend the system drive.