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DiskTester™ 2.0 Information Page

Welcome

DiskTester is available two ways:

How does DiskTester work?

DiskTester runs on Apple’s Mac OS 10.4.x (Tiger) and 10.5.x (Leopard). See also the FAQ.

DiskTester™ measures disk performance, especially RAID setups. But it can also be used for testing digital camera cards, network performance, or comparing single-drive performance with SATA, FireWire and USB. Its sophisticated testing approach offers the most consistent and reliable results available today.

Disktester is used for internal testing by several manufacturers of RAID and SATA hardware cards to test their products as well as performance-review sites (see below).

Please see the DiskTester User Manual for complete details. See also example output for all the commands and the software license.

If a command-line interface is new to you, please see Command Syntax Primer.

What does it cost?

DiskTester is available as a personal use license for $24.95 USD via PayPal.  Use is subject to the License Agreement.

To purchase a disktester personal-use license (use subject to the License Agreement), click the button below.   A linke for downoading DiskTester will be emailed to you, normally within 24 hours.  Occassionally, there are email delivery problems; you may check this list to see if your domain is included.

Before purchasing, please check current delivery status—responses to purchases are handled manually, and occassionally I am unable to respond due to lack of internet access.

Thank you!

Utilized by performance-review site barefeats.com

DiskTester is frequently used by the popular Macintosh performance test site barefeats.com, which began using DiskTester when it was first released.  To date, a number of performance reviews at barefeats.com have used DiskTester

Though DiskTester lacks GUI and must be run via Terminal, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool for simulating capture and playback of DV footage”—April 15, 2005 "Speed Tests".

Here are various performance reviews at barefeats.com which have used DiskTester (partial list, there are many, many more reviews using DiskTester as of November 2008):

Sonnet’s PCI Express SATA Host Adapter with Port Multiplication

Fibre Channel VideoRAID from Medea

Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 8 Port External PCI-X Host Adapter

HighPoint RocketRAID PCI-X host adapter

TransIntl's SwiftData 200 Puts 5 Drives INSIDE A G5 Power Mac

What Set of Four SATA Drives Creates The Fastest RAID 0 (striped) Set?

G5 Jam ROCKS!

Four Drive RAID on the G5: Ultra 320 SCSI vs Serial ATA vs FireWire 800

Sonnet Lobs A Bombshell Called 'Tempo-X 4+4' Into The SATA Arena

Utilized by AMUG

The Macintosh users group AMUG also uses disktester for testing. Here are a few of the reviews that use DiskTester (partial list, there are many, many more reviews using DiskTester as of November 2008)

Quiet 5 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier Enclosure

Five Drive eSATA Port Multiplier Upgrade

Port Multiplier PCIe SATA II Host Adapter

Hardware 128-bit DES Hard Drive Encryption

Dual Bay eSATA Enclosure & Disk Cloner

Adding a Drive Bay to the PowerMac G5 Quad

Macintosh Drive Wars

FirmTek SeriTek/2eEN4

Build Your Own Four Bay Enclosure

WiebeTech eSATA Four-bay Enclosure

The Ultimate SATA Mac mini

Four Bay SATA Enclosure

FAQ (frequently asked questions)

Is DiskTester a 64-bit application?

With testing, we’ve determined that a 64-bit DiskTester offers no testing advantage whatsoever over the 32-bit version and is a much larger binary. Therefore, it is available as a 32-bit program only. When and if new features are added that require more memory, then it will be provided as a 64-bit binary.

What makes DiskTester the best choice?

DiskTester has proven itself with years of trusted use by testing sites and hardware developers as offering consistent and reliable testing results.

Solid results you can trust are what matter, pretty graphs are of no value.

What other features does DiskTester have?

Aside from performance testing, reliability is critical. We recommend that all users setting up “production” systems run a full 24-hour reliability test with DiskTester. Testing your system with the asynchronous I/O test is also a good idea (run-async-test).

DiskTester can also create and read hieararchies of files and folders—a great tool for testing real-world performance with repeatable results. For example, a file hierarchy can be created, and then Finder-copy and backup tests performed. Or you can use DiskTester to test that file hierarchy directly.

Finally, disktester can “dump” information about all your mounted volumes in convenient text form for diagnosis and analysis.