hd-speed-test

When it comes to testing the speed of hard drives to determine just how fast they are and if they are fast enough for video editing two tools generally come to mind. They are the utilities from video card makers AJA and Blackmagic. They are the ones I have always used. Recently John Flowers, of LifeZero and That Post Show fame, began the process of writing a new utility that attempts to more accurately replicate the data that is written to a drive during real world video editing with real world editing applications. My first thought was, “isn’t that what AJA and Blackmagic do anyway?” Maybe not. John compares drive speeds tests to the miles per gallon rating on an automobile. They say a number on the sticker but you rarely get those numbers in real world driving. The applications from card manufactures may more reflect what you get when working with those cards. I’m not sure exactly what would be the perfect drive speed benchmarking tool but it seems that that’s exactly what John is going for. He has written an article explaining exactly what he is trying to do. It’s quite techie but there’s some good info in there as to exactly how software operations work.

He’s looking for people to help test the software and provide feedback. (Real) HD Speed Test is a free download that can be found here. Try it out for yourself and provide some feedback at info (at) unscale (dot) com. You could also post in the comments on the Drive Speed Test page. While I’ll be watching this with interest to see what AJA or Blackmagic might say about this little app it can only benefit the community to have a good drive speed testing application that was made for us, by us. We need more FUBU software out in the #editingandpost community.