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#QUICK DISK TEST MAC SOFTWARE#
If you are unsure, you can test the drive speed with the software first! It’s no good trying to copy your file off the fast SD card, but putting it onto a slow hard drive that only gives you 90MB/s write speed, because that’s the speed you’ll end up being limited to. You need to copy to an SSD, such as the internal drive on all recent MacBook Pros, because the write speed for the drive that you are copying to needs to be faster than the read speed you are expecting from the SD card. Then copy it off the card to your hard drive onto a good, fast SSD.
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For this second test, just grab the biggest file you can, probably a large video file, and put it on the card. In this instance you can perform the testing with the software mentioned on this page, and then perform a second test to verify the results. You can really save time in your workflow if you are using a fast card when regularly downloading large capacity cards.
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High read speed is useful because this is what is one of the things that determines the speed at which data can be copied from your card onto your computer. One thing you can be a bit more confident about is the read speeds from the cards. BUT, you probably can’t place so much confidence on the actual figures, and it’s quite likely that they won’t exactly match the speeds quoted by the manufacturers.
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As long as you use the same software for all of the tests then the comparative result will be useful. What does this mean for you? Well it means that you can probably perform some comparative testing between the cards or drives you own, in order to figure out which ones are fastest, or which ones are broken. From what I was told though, it does seem that Mac/PC/Linux thing makes a difference. I have regular tested the same drive or card with multiple applications, and got nearly identical results. In my experience, software doesn’t seem to make all that much difference. In other words, the software and hardware that’s used for testing can have a big impact on the result.
#QUICK DISK TEST MAC PC#
This particular SD card company was able to share internal testing results with me that showed their cards registering vastly different speeds when being tested on a Mac, a PC and a Linux machine. The problem with quoted card speeds is there is no industry standardized testing. Having a good rapport with this particular company already, I reached out to them to ask them why that was. I did some SD card speed testing recently and I wasn’t able to reach the specifications that were quoted by the manufacturer. 2) that all use the same type of cable and often require specific cables to get the best results. This kind of thing is becoming more and more useful as we enter the murky and sometimes confusing world of USB-C, which features several different standards (3.0, 3.1 Gen.1, 3.1 Gen. If two different cables are giving you vastly different results, you know there’s an issue. In the past, I’ve also found it useful in testing possibly faulty USB and Thunderbolt cables. Whilst you might not want to delve deep into reviewing these kinds of products (you can leave that to the real photo nerds like me), it can be useful for testing your memory cards and hard drives when you suspect that one of them might be faulty.
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Over the years I have tested many hard drive and memory cards, and it occurred to me this week that I’ve never written a post about the freely available software that you can use to do these kinds of tests yourself.
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