What is a decent speed for an SSD?

How fast is SSD compared to HDD?

SSDs and HDDs are two different types of storage devices, and work in different ways. SSD becomes an increasingly popular choice relying on its higher speed over HDD. SSD drives use flash-based memory to store information and have no physical moving parts. That leads to shorter wait times when you start up OS, open apps, or do heavy computing tasks.

But, how fast is an SSD drive when compared to an HDD? The answer mostly depends on which SSD and HDD you compare. Generally speaking, a standard SSD drive can read sequential data at a speed of about 550 megabytes per second (MBps) and write it at 520 MBps while a fast HDD may carry out sequential reads and writes at just 125MBps. 

So, an SSD drive is about 4 times faster than HDD. It is exactly the outstanding read-write speed that makes many users decide to upgrade HDD to SSD with the purpose of speeding up Windows computer.

How to check SSD speed in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7?

The above content just elaborates the speed of HDD and SSD drive and reveals the SSD is much faster when compared to an HDD. However, how to know the specific read-write speed of SSD or HDD in Windows computer? For this task, you have two options.

Option 1. Task Manager

First of all, you can use the Windows built-in tool: Task Manager to test SSD speed of writing or reading data. The process is quite easy to follow:

Step 1. Click on the search icon then type "Task Manager" in the search bar.

Step 2. Task Manager will pop up as a search result, and you can open it from there.

Step 3. In the Task Manager screen, go to the "Performance" tab and click the SSD drive form the left column.

Step 4. Look under the performance graphs for Read and Write speeds.

This speed report is a little rough, which just indicates the write and read speed in a given time and it will vary depending on what you are doing now.

Option 2. Professional HDD/SSD speed test tool

The Task Manager offers you a snapshot of the current read/write speed for your hard drive. To get a more accurate test, you can use a professional disk speed test tool named AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It has two modes for you to check SSD or HDD speed: Simple Mode and Export Mode. The latter one is more comprehensive and powerful. You can download the demo version to check how fast is SSD drive.

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click "All Tools" and select "Disk Speed Test". Or right-click the SSD and choose "Disk Speed Test" from the drop-down menu.

Step 2. You can select the partition you want to test and the Simple Mode is selected by default, which will just report the write-read speed of selected SSD drive. For a more comprehensive result, click on “Pro Mode”.

Step 3. After launching the Pro Mode, you can alter the default settings: partition, Average/Maximum speed, Size, Test Duration, Test Number.

Step 5. After everything is set as you wish, just click on "Start" button to begin testing the SSD partition speed.

Wait for a while and you can see the result, and you can also export the result as a screenshot or TXT file.

If you think the SSD speed does not match with what it advertised, you can do something to improve the SSD speed, such as making SATA controller run in AHCI mode, avoiding disk defrag, disabling Hibernate & Superfetch, aligning SSD partition, etc. Among them, aligning SSD partition is proven to be very effective. That can also be completed by the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Step 1. Install and launch the AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, locate the SSD and right-click one of its partition, select  "Advanced"-> "Partition Alignment".

Step 2. In the mini window, you can set partition 4K alignment (4096 Sector). And click "OK" to continue.

Step 3.Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the pending operation.

If the program shows "The current partition is already optimized thus there’s no need to align it again" in the Step 2, it means the partition has been aligned. In such a case, you can continue to check other partitions of this SSD drive.

Summary

So, now you should know to check how fast is your SSD drive in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7. Choose a proper method according to your requirements. If your SSD drive runs very fast, you can transfer OS from HDD to SSD to enjoy better performance via the mentioned AOMEI Partition Assistant software. In addition, it provides many other incredible features: clone HDD/SSD to SSD, secure erase SSD drive without hurting its lifespan, convert HDD/SSD between MBR and GPT without deleting partitions and so on.

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