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Do you have any idea how fast your hard drive is? I am not talking about the technical specifications that you may find out from the producer's website, but the real-life performance. While some people don't care much about such things, I know a lot of them that really want to know how fast is every part of their computers, and especially for them I am going to talk about HD Tach.


Setup

At this time, the last version of this program is 3.0.4.0, and its setup package has only 1MB in size, so downloading it should be easy for everyone. While the installation process seems to be a little longer than usual with regular Windows software of this size, I don't think there are any special problems to mention. Just read the license agreement, the "read me" page and choose those options that you have to set every time when installing a program, as you can see in the screenshots below.



Interface
The interface of this program doesn't leave you wandering through countless different screens and menus, because there's no need for such a thing. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the first step inside HD Tach requires to select the hard drive you want to benchmark, and if you have only one, there's no need to use the drop down menu - just select the type of bench to run (quick or long), and press Run Test...


Features
...but if you want to load the results of another hard drive for comparison, you can press the Graph Data button and choose one item from the list. Of course that you can also do this after the test is complete, so it's your choice. The quick and long test don't take more than a few minutes to run, and during this period, you'll see the window from the screenshot to the right, so I advise you to go and get a beer instead of working with your computer, because this may change the results.

According to the producer of this program, you can get updates for the benchmarks available and the results database built into HD Tach, but it seems I wasn't lucky today, because these operations failed.

As you can see in the screenshot to the left, using this program is very easy, and comparing the results obtained with the ones already in the database is not something that requires any special knowledge. These being said, if you want to use this program for commercial purposes, you may also consider the RW version, which ads write testing to the reading benchmarks present in the basic one.


The Good

HD Tach is one of the best programs for testing the real hard speed and latency time of your hard drive, and while a lot of IT professionals use it, every computer user should be able to give it a spin.

The Bad

This program is not certified to work with Vista yet, and the official website has a page that misled me into thinking the product is no longer available for sale.

Conclusion

For 19.95$, the basic version, and 49.95$, the RW one, HD Tach is a "must have" for those that build computers and want to be sure they deliver the best to their customers, but not only them. The trial period of 14 days should be enough for most home users, but you get a good deal for your money with the basic version so... why not purchase it?

Developer: Simpli Software
Price: 19.95$(Commercial)/49.95$(RW)
Trial Link: Download