Blackmagic Disk Speed Test App Reviews

Great App, love the fact that it’s free but it doesn’t display correctly on my 11” macbook air, the bottom of the program is off the screen, would like the ability to make the interface smaller and save a report to disk. Otherwise its absolutely fabulous.

Downloaded (twice) to run on MacBook Pro but it would not open. Gave useless error message that said to make sure your OS is up to date (mine is) and try again. Deleted plus removed from Dock and tried again. Exact same result. A big waste of time.

Does exactly as advertised.

I was running this, about a month ago or so... then today with a new secondary hard drive... "Blackmagic Disk Speed Test cannot be opened because of a problem. Check with the developer..... etc."

I can’t even see the whole app on a 13” screen. Was this only tested on 15”+ screens? Isn’t the 13” MBP one of the best selling models? It seems like a huge portion of the UI was spent on two speedometers, but could’ve easily been replaced with progress bars from AppKit. The read/write functionality of random formats could also be tucked away in an panel that opens only when the user presses a button; I don’t care, and I doubt most people even know what 10 bit YUV vs 12 bit RGB is. It’s useless statistics that, again, should be hidden by default and this will make the app fit on even the tiniest of resolutions.

good to know my SSD is performing as advertised (1400MBps!)

Dont know why, but it crashes every time i try to start it. should work, so I will go looking for other test program.

In OSX 10.9.5, crashes anytime I attempt to select a different external target drive. I have no idea what it’s testing by default, but I assume my internal Mac HD? Could be cool, but it’s buggy and the GUI needs some work.

it doesnt fit on the screen of my 2015 13” mbp…ill give one star

This app is great. If you do video editing on the Mac you should have this in your tool kit. If you don’t do video editing, don’t understant what this is testing, your not going to be happy. This app clearly tells me what video formate I will not have good results with. If you don’t know what 10 bit YUV 4:2:2 is, this app is not for you. If you not looking to do stress testing, this app is not for you. If your looking for a quick and simple hard disk speed test like the network speed test, this app is not for you. The only short coming is the author didn’t fully explain what this app is for. For people doing video editing this is a five star app.

Downloaded from the App store. Installed on a Mac Pro 4,1 running 10.6.8. Crashes on launch every time. FAIL. Have emailed the developer.

I have a 27” 2011 iMac that I use only for video editing, mostly in 1080p but with some UHD and 4K video. I use several single-disk drives attached to my iMac via USB 3.0 for tasks that aren’t speed-intensive, as well as a 2-disk G-RAID configured in RAID 0 (and connected via USB 3) for my video files. I recently added a Seagate Expansion 5TB drive to use as an archiving location for video media that I no longer need to edit with. I downloaded BM Disk Speed Test because I was curious about the relative read/write speeds of my Seagate and Western Digital USB 3 drives, as well as my 4TB G-RAID in RAID 0 configuration. The results of the tests with this app were surprising, and I wonder about their accuracy. Briefly, the Seagate and WD USB 3 drives had pretty much identical stats; the WD is 80% full, while the Seagate is ~ 25% full, but perhaps this test wouldn’t catch performance difference between drives because of fullness. What was surprising is that the RAID 0 drive had the same stats as the single-disk drives: 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 HD1080 write: 5-6, read: 6-7. The checkbox that’s supposed to (simplistically) tell you if editing will “work” tells me that all the drives can work for SD editing only, not HD (1080P), and there’s no difference between the RAID 0 drive and the single disk drives. Well, the G-RAID does indeed work for editing 4:2:2 1080p video shot on my Sony FS7, but the WD and Seagate drives fall short in their throughput for video editing. That’s my real-world experience, and it’s not surprising at all, but this app gets it wrong. It doesn’t make sense that this app pulls similar stats for my single-platter hard drives and the 2-disk RAID 0, both connected via USB 3.

The GUI is absolutely massive and on a 13” MBP Retina it simply doesnt scale well, I can’t see the full app without moving it around on my screen. Fix this please. And after selecting the target disk… I don’t see where it says it on the interface except for clicking the gear again. The interface needs a lot of work. Easy fixes as well.

This excellent product works precisely as advertised. If, like BBurr55, you think it doesn’t function because you get a message saying your drive is "read only” and you need to pick a drive with Read/Write privileges, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s nonsense because, "I’ve been reading and writing to them both before and after the test.” You might be forgiven for thinking that, but you’d still be wrong. Mac example: Though you can read and write to your external drives, that’s because the computer knows you as Administrator (or “system"). Open the Finder and go to the external drive you want to test. If you have right-click enabled on your mouse, do that or go FIle>Get Info or Command+I . When the Info window opens you’ll see at the bottom that under Sharing & Permissions “system" and “wheel" are set to Read & Write, but “everyone" is set to Read only. This is by default to keep hackers and malware from writing to your drive. It sees the App, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, as “everyone” To run the test click the lock in the lower right-hand corner of the Info Window and enter your password to unlock. Change “everyone" to Read & Write and then close the window. You can now run the speed test. You should change the settings back when finished for security. Great App, but judging by the complaints you might want to warn about this in advance. Thanks!

Mac Pro, Mid 2012, 5.1, w/ OS 10.11, El Capitan. Will not check disk w/an OS on it, OS X or Windows. Says it’s read only.

I was looking for a general-purpose disk benchmark app that just reports mb/s for sequential and random read/write, and this app isn’t it. This app tells what quality of video the disk can handle. Aside from the slightly somewhat confusing UI (e.g. the button to stop the test says “start”, the numbers in the lower-right don’t have any unit, and it’s so tall that it barely fits on a rMBP screen), it’s a decent app and appears to work as advertised. It’s also the only disk benchmarking app in the app store, it gets some points just for existing. For my purposes, it does report the instatenous MB/s in the top section, so I could get a rough idea of sequential performance, although it doesn’t record the MB/s numbers anywhere so I just have to watch it and pick one.

This is an example of simplicity that is not intuitive. There is no information on how to use the tool, just two speed dials, a large “Start” button and a settings button in the center, and a table of data at the bottom. There is no explanation on what “stress” size to choose, and once the tool starts, it never stops until you click on the “Start” button again. I had to read the documentation to learn that is how one stops the tool. There is no indicator or information in the UI to tell you how many times you should let the reads and writes complete, or a progress indicator. The UI for selecting the drive to test looks like Finder, so at first I thought I clicked on Finder accidentally, rather an intuitive UI (e.g., radio button) to select the available drives. The data table has no explanation in the UI. Also, you cannot easily test the internal drive where the OS resides, since after I read NothingToGain’s review, I learned you have to, via OS X, temporarily provide everyone with write permission to the drive in order to do the test. Again, this information should be provided in the UI. As for the data, I have not verified it, but I will give it the benefit of the doubt given others on the Internet have indicated that it works.

Claims to run 10.6.6 or later, yet will not function under 10.6.8. Do not install it. Apparently to get around this bug you have to spend hours installing some internal/debugging root packages using terminal and sudo, to get this to run. NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.

There are users here complaining about “Disc Read Only” messages: just choose your Documents folder within your home directory to test instead of the Macintosh HD. It works without any problems, I also tested on NAS.

It is very helpful to have this application in the App Store. I refer my clients to it all the time to check and see if their hard drive needs to be upgraded. However, its specifications are incorrect. It does NOT support OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.