I’ve been interested in a SSD or HDD upgrade for my HDD recently after monitoring it on task manager and noticing it cap out at 10 MB/s however I researched a more accurate way to test it and used “winsat disk -drive d” command in the command prompt and found 180.31 MB/s for read and 157.13 MB/s for write and I’m not sure which of these values to compare with the MB/s show on offers online. I’m aware that I might be fully misunderstanding all of the information so any explanations about what to look for would be greatly appreciated.
There’s not really one read or write speed for HDDs or SSDs, it depends on what you’re doing. What you often see advertised is the sequential read/write speed because those will generally be the biggest numbers.
But lots of operations on a computer aren’t big, sequential reads or writes but smaller, more random operations and those are a lot slower, both on HDDs and SSDs.
But it is still here SSDs truly shine. Since they don’t have mechanical bits that need to move around they can respond to those random operations much faster, meaning your system will feel more responsive.
A tool like CrystalDiskMark can benchmark different types of read and writes letting you see how the disk perform in different usage scenarios.