Blackmagic Disk Speed Test 4+

A few easy UI tweaks would make this a five star app: 1) The name of the drive to be tested doesn't appear anywhere on the window. It should. 2) The Start/Stop button is only labeled "Start." When running, the label should change to "Stop." 3) There is no way to set the number of write/read loop iterations for a test. Control is entirely manual. 4) There is no loop count, so a user needs to carefully watch/monitor the test to know how many times it has been performed. 5) A log of the write/read speeds, for each loop iteration, would be nice.

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 MacBook Pro, 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 MacBook Pro 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.

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.