Blackmagic Disk Speed Test for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Capt.Huffnpuff

  Blackmagic is now faster enough to rate internal SSD speeds, even the Startup Disk

  Blackmagic has been updated to adequately report the speed of SSD devices. When Blackmagic tries to read the Startup Disk, you get the message that the device is not writeable, hence you cannot rate the the transfer rates of the drive. I found a workaround that will report the rates of the Startup Disk. Its quite simple. Create a disk image (.dmg) using the disk utility specifying file->new image->blank image. Make it big enough for Blackmagic to work with (7+ GB) and name it what you will. Mount the volume (if it is not already mounted). In Blackmagic select the disk image mounted. Since the “volume” is on your Startup Disk, you will see how fast it drive is. On my 2016 PC, I am seeing speeds like 1,000+ MB/s write, and 1100+ MB/S read. I have tried this on my older mackbooks with SSD and they do scale down as the device is older. On an older PC the rates I see are 500 MB/S both read and write, as you would expect. I have run Blackmagic on USB 2, thumb drives, USB 3, and USB C devices to see if I’m getting my money’s worth. You can easily detect when a device is performing subpar and, and with the spinning disk, you can see is transfer speeds deteriorates over time.

  
  
• By MidlandPaintedTurtle

  Almost Perfect, Great Price

  Disk Speed Test is a very useful product and one cannot complain about the price point. However, a few enhancements would make this program truly wonderful. Ability to Specify Number of Runs Instead of just running forever, it would be nice to be able to specify that Disk Speed Test is to run some user specified number of times. Ability to specify the pause period between runs At the default values, it is hard to stop the program after it has totally finished one test, and before it has started another. It would be nice to be able to specify a pause between runs. Log File It would be nice if Disk Speed Test had an option to save a log file with the test results for each run. Something that one could import into Excel or some other spreadsheet would be idea. Command Line Run The ability to run Disk Speed Test from the command line would allow for automation. And also for remote collection of such data by admins, who could use this feature with ARD or other secure command line login.

  
  
• By 2584LuckyLu

  Great tool, price is perfect

  i wish it had a button in the UI to cancel current test. i know i can simply quit application but doing that on SD cards always makes me nervous. I know about all the pertient data i need from the first couple reads/writes on an SD card, dont need the full 10min + run of tests. But an awesome tool nonetheless. Installed and ran immediately on Sierra 12.6, but doesnt open when you click to launch from the Windows store, so close the store and open from applications drawer.

  
  
• By ChangeMachine

  Nice FREE Utility

  I use this often and appreciate it. The update (3.1) seems to provide much more stable speed readings than the 2.x version I've been using (where the guage is all over the map). One issue I have is that it seems to have issues with NTFS formatted drives. I'm using Paragon's NTFS for Windows, and BMDST writes to it well (430 to my SSD) but on the read test it often (though not always) fails with "Error reading the test file". Aside from this niche case it's an awesome tool.

  
  

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