How To Use CrystalDiskMark | What Do The Numbers Mean?

crystal dismark is likely the most popular benchmarking software you can find for storage it's easy to use for beginners but also has some depth has tools that power users like as well with this software you can test the health and speed of pretty much any device you have connected to your pc solid state drives hard drives sd cards thumb drives literally anything so let's check it out so the first thing you're going to need is a desk and make sure your computer is on top of that desk most important so go to your favorite browser and head to crystalmark.info you want crystaldisk mark not crystaldisk info crystaldisk info can be handy when used in conjunction with crystaldiskmark but any information that i personally am curious about can be read from hw info but if you want some more comprehensive diagnostics of your storage this is pretty handy tool for that but anyways click on the latest version of crystal disk mark and click on that download button here you will get two options the boring standard edition or if you have any class at all the shizuku edition so click on the appropriate installer you can use this one for windows vista or later and once you have that installed you can go ahead and launch it so we're going to start with the quick and dirty so if you're testing an nvme drive just go ahead and on this drop down here and set it to nvme ssd otherwise just leave it as it is make sure you have the right drive selected funny thing i noticed about recently was the different drives if you turn them sideways they have these whimsical little faces and every time i look at them now that's what i see i'm going to be using the d drive an important note here is to make sure you have the reasonable amount of space left at minimum you want to have enough to allow tests to write freely to the drive so if we're just doing the one gigabyte test that's what you need but ideally you want to have at least 10 percent of the drive free and that's a bonus to that is that you won't get any unnecessary wear to your flash storage from there the only thing you may want to change is this number here that's the test count and just go ahead and turn that to one we're gonna leave it at one gigabyte right here now hit this all button and let the test run all right so now we get the results for the test so what do they actually mean so obviously here we have the read and write columns so this first row sequential one megabyte q depth of bait and one thread this is typically going to be your highest score this is the one they put on the box this is the pretty numbers for example the drive i am testing is a 500 gigabyte wd black sn750 which is a gen 3 pcie ssd with advertised sequential read write speeds of up to 3 430 megabytes per second and 2 600 megabytes per second respectively and you can see at least in the right speeds they are beating that but not in the read speeds but it's close enough so that's fine so compare those results to what your manufacturer has set out and as long as they're close to that there's nothing to worry about but if they're pretty far off at least from that first row there might be an issue with the drive especially if it's new the second row is a sequential 128 kilobyte a q depth of 32 and one thread and this is supposed to be closer to what the real world actual maximum is and the other one's more of a theoretical one but as you can see here it's very close to what the first one was anyways but as you stress the drive more you'll notice these numbers might go down faster than the original first test that one megabyte test the third row is random four kilobyte chunks q depth of 32 and 16 threads so this is going to be your maximum random performance of the drive random is where you'll see the spinning hard drives suffer the seek times take a huge toll on the speed and that's why there's a huge advantage with flash storage over traditional hard drives the fourth and final row is the random 4k chunks one q depth and one thread this is going to represent the close at least close to the minimum performance of the drive and you can see here it's nowhere near the numbers that the other ones have gotten so that's the basics if that's all you want you can leave it there you can take the results from the test compared to what other people have online compared to what the manufacturer has set up for your drive to be as long as they're close to that then there's nothing really to worry about and if the results are drastically different from what the manufacturer has set maybe you should consider getting an rma so that's all you wanted to know thanks for watching hit that like button i really appreciate it but if you want to know a little bit more we're going to dip into the weeds just a little bit so before we get into the different pre-made settings i want to quickly go over the parameters and what they mean so the test number obviously this test count all it's going to be is how many times it's going to run through the test so if you were to hit it for five it's going to repeat that test five times and give you the average number over those five tests the test size so that's essentially what it's going to be reading and writing i recommend if you actually want a better understanding of your drive to do at least say 32 gigabytes it's gonna take longer but not a huge deal but we'll leave that at one go for 32 gigs and try that out and the reason why you want to go with the higher ones especially when it comes to nvme ssds or even just ssds and in general is because the shorter tests don't really stress the dram and doesn't represent what the drive might be like over the long period with bigger file sizes as that dram gets saturated even with one pass with a 32 gig test you can see that the write speeds drop as well as the random read speeds so read and write already went through that it's pretty self-explanatory we're gonna go over here to settings and settings in this first row you have the type that's sequential versus random so sequential is simply put is a read write operation that executes in a series of blocks like when copying a large video file whereas random is as it suggests the drive must seek and execute on different parts of the drive randomly hard drives have a seat time of around 10 milliseconds where solid state drives have a seek time of around 0.1 milliseconds and that's what leads to the substantial performance gain so practically you'll notice those random performances when say booting up your pc or updating an operating system the block size is simply the size of each section of bits or bytes being read or written so many small blocks are usually slower to read than few large blocks so for example a four kilobyte is going to be harder to read than the one megabyte or even higher than that q depth is the number of pending transactions to the drive for sata 32 is the highest q depth while nvme bumps the bar up just a smidge at 65 000. but before you get too excited a personal pc only has a queue depth typically of one to four at any given time even servers and nas they only go up to about 32 and that's on really heavy loads so we're not seeing that huge q depth being taken advantage of yet and threads is pretty simple it's just processes how many processes are trying to access the drive it want to get one given time and it's not a multiplier it really depends on the drive and how much throughput it can have it's not going to double the speed just by doubling the amount of threads it doesn't work like that so to put it in layman's term i found this analogy on a form and essentially went like this you have people and each person has a list of requests of information the number of people are the threads and their lists are the queue depth and the block size is which each request on that list is for example if we had a 4k size let's say a queue depth of four and say let's go eight threads for example so that means they have eight people threads each of them has a list of four requests q depth of four with each request asking for four kilobytes of data that helped me understand it a little better so these settings all here can be customized to your liking i can't go through every specific situation why you might want to change them but they're there if there's any specific thing that you wanted to do for example say you were setting up a server you would definitely want to use a higher q depth because it's going to going to take advantage of that so anyways we're not going to touch too much in here except for these measure time and interval time measure time i don't know exactly what that means i've tried to find the answer to that if you know what it is please let me know i don't know exactly what that means but interval time is simply in between each test it gives you that five seconds buffer in between them and that's gonna let the dram uh just give it a break so that your performance is not going to take a huge hit so if you want to actually see what this can do your drive and see push to the limits you want to turn down that interval time definitely so go over here to profile and these are where you want to see the real world perform specifically but peak performance let's look at that first so if you go to peak performance we have similar here this is like we had before that sequential one megabyte q depth of eight and one thread this one bumping it up with a q depth of 32 threads 16 and here we have the input output operations per second and with a q depth of 32 and 16 again and this is the latency of q depth of 32 and thread 16 so when these get red if i were just to click on one of these the the results in here is not going to be megabytes per second that's going to be the iops the input output operations per second number so when you actually do this test you're going to see that it's going to have a huge number look at that uh what how much is that 462 000 that's not megabytes per second that is the like i said input output operations per second and this is the latency 1100 microseconds so this profiles for very heavy workloads definitely not gonna be useful for people just using a pc at home so go over here profile and click on real world performance and this one's essentially the same as we had before with that last one at peak performance except that instead all of these are gonna be at one queue and the thread count of one as well so you're going to see the performance is much lower and again like we had in the previous one we have the iops and the latency so you can tinker around with that if you want as well to see what a more modest performance would be like and of course in here if you want to change these this read write that's what the default is it's going to test the read and the right of the drives but if you just click on read it will only test the read column and also if you click on write obviously it'll just test the right column that's it last and certainly not least is the theme of the shizuku edition comes with these beautiful beautiful themes that you can change to your pleasure and your liking and enjoyment anyways i hope this video has been helpful definitely use this program when you first get a drive it gives you a nice snapshot to see if the drive is working properly see what kind of speeds are there and in the future if you feel like you're having any issues with it make sure you save that for later you can compare it to your previous testings to see if the drive has changed at all so yeah let me know how it goes with you if there's any corrections that need to be made in this video please let me know this channel is called techie literate for a reason and i am learning as i go and trying to share this information with you the reason why i made this video is because when i was researching how to use this software i came across the video first video i found was no offense to the person but terrible it was like he was just learning it for the first time just trying it out so i hope this has been helpful like i said and yeah my name is nick this has been tech illiterate have a good one

Channel: Tech Illiterate

Views: 248,473

Keywords: crystaldiskmark, crystal disk mark, solid state drive, hard drive, windows 10, how to test the speed of your hard drive, speed test, hard disk, tech tutorial, solid state drive vs hard drive, SSD benchmark, How To Use CrystalDiskMark, What Do The Numbers Mean, solid state drive vs hard drive speed test, solid state drive vs m.2, tutorial, crystaldiskmark nvme, crystaldiskmark shizuku edition, crystaldiskmark download, ssd benchmark test, real world, peak, crystaldiskmark ssd

Id: JI8QS74Xz38

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021