Determining the Hard Drive Speed in Windows NT 4.0

Determining If Your Hard Disk Is Fast Enough

Unlike Windows 95 and Windows 98, Windows NT has a Performance Monitor Counter that can be used to let you know whether or not your hard drive is too slow.

To take advantage of this feature of the Performance Monitor:

• Log on as a member of the Administrators Group.
• Go to a Command Prompt.
• Type “diskperf” (without the quotes) and touch the enter key. This will enable you to view a Help document about how to turn diskperf on and off.
• Types “diskperf -y” (without the quotes) and touch the enter key. This will start the Disk Performance Monitor Counters, or it will show you if the counters have already been started.
• Now restart the system.

More!!

1. Open Performance Monitor (Click Start, Programs, Administrative Tools, Performance Monitor)
2. Choose Physical Disk from the Object drop down menu.
3. Choose Avg Disk Bytes/Transfer from the counter.

Now let the counter run for several days. A value greater than 20KB indicates that the disk drive is performing well, generally. Values lower than 20KB will indicate to you that an application is accessing a disk inefficiently and the drive should be replaced with a faster one.