Blackmagic Disk

Blackmagic Disk is designed to stress-test a hard disk, to determine its reading and writing speeds. The application's functionality goes beyond that of a normal benchmark tool, because it also reports a drive's speed changes over time. This is quite good to know, especially if you intend to run something that puts a constant strain on your drives, like high quality videos. What's more, the application is completely free and you can have it up and running in no time.

The user interface resembles the dashboard of a modern sports car. The two gauges, for writing and reading speeds, are the first things you will notice. All you have to do is hit the large Start button, between the two gauges and the application will start testing your drive immediately.

Besides displaying your disk's reading and writing speeds, the application lets you know if your drive can support certain types of videos and how fast it can read or write them. You can find all the answers you need in a table of contents, beneath the aforementioned gauges.

The application will test your disk's reading and writing capabilities, using large blocks of data. It allows you to choose between different sizes, from 1 GB to 5 GB. You can also decide to test a different drive on your Mac. The test results can be saved as a screenshot in your local folders.