Important Update!

This version of HD Speed Test is completely broken on OS X 10.7.1+ (Lion). I'm working on a ground-up rewrite that should be available in April, 2012.

Until then, if you have 10.7.0 or 10.6.x (or 10.5.x) of OS X, go ahead and grab it and let me know how it works for you.

HD Speed Test

HD Speed Test is a drive benchmarking tool which accurately tests the speed of your drives when using various video file formats. This tool works on Mac OS X 10.5+ and has been tested on OS X Lion up to version 10.7

Download the HD Speed Test Tool

Why?

Because other benchmarking tools just read and write video files, as if they are ordinary data. But, they are not. An application has to transcode information going onto the disk or coming off of it, unless the computer is just copying binary files. Other tools show you the raw read/write speeds, this tool shows you the real speed your application can expect.

This matters when you are editing video, capturing to a drive, playing video back in an application (iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer, to name a few products).

It also matters when you are doing just about everything else except copying data in the Finder, which -- let's face it -- rarely happens when you're working with video files.

About The Results

Results are first shown based on types of footage, not on frame-rates. Footage can be 720p, 1080p, 2k and 4k. All footage is created with the idea of chroma sampling as part of the read, write and create "codec" -- chroma goes from 4:2:0 (lowest end) to 4:4:4 (highest chroma sampling).

"Binary Data" is a representation not of video data or a codec. All footage is pushed through the NSData and Core Video Class libraries.

Results Details

FPS - A measure of the actual, possible, largest number of frames per second the drive can sustain for any given codec shown.

Streams - The number of streams, represented as a rounded down number, that the drive can sustain at once for the codec shown.

RT Capture - Whether the drive (and system) are capable of capturing the codec in real-time for the codec shown.

The current version is 1.2.2

Errata

There is a small, possibly annoying message when you first launch DST that says an update is available, then fails to retrieve it (from my no longer functioning Mobile Me address).

This is a small bug and is the only known bug in the program.

Contact me if you have any questions.