How fast is the hard drive that you have installed on your computer? How fast the USB Flash Drive or memory card? If you can’t answer those questions but would like to know the answer, or want to test if your system can reach the advertised values published by the drive manufacturer, then you may want to use a program like HD Speed for that.

HD Speed is a small portable program for the Windows operating system that you can use to test the performance of connected drives. Depending on your version of Windows, you may need to run it with elevated privileges. Just right-click the program executable and select run as administrator from the context menu to do just that.

The first thing that you may want to do after the program has loaded is to pick a drive that you want to test. HD Speed displays drives with their Windows drive letter, and as physical drives as well. Once you have selected the drive you can either hit the start button right away to start a read test of the drive, or modify the test preferences first.

Here you can switch to write or combined read and write tests, change the block size and starting position, or define a duration for the test. If you do not define a duration, HD Speed will benchmark the drive until you click on the stop button in the program interface.

Results are displayed as a graph and as current and average speed values in the program. The average speed is highlighted in purple, the current speed in red in the graph.

If values look relatively low, or are on the low end when you compare them to the manufacturer’s specifications, you may want to start investigating the matter further. Sometimes it can be something simple as running a drive in a mode that is not optimal.