I’ve just picked up one of those fancy USB 3 drives to use with my Macbook Air as a sort of secondary backup when I travel, as it was so inexpensive for a 120 Gb drive. I wanted to know how much faster it might be, even on my non-USB 3 Air, than the run of the mill USB drive that you can pick up for a few bucks at the local electronics store, or get as a giveaway at a tech conference, for example. I also wanted to see how fast the new SSD drive that I installed in my Macbook Air was, just for kicks.
I wasn’t sure how to measure the relative speed of these drives, though, until I found out about Disk Speed Test from the fine folks over at OS X Daily. I was able to check the speed of my fast USB drive, my internal SSD drive, and an external USB-powered drive, and compare them all, which is pretty peachy.
Here’s how it works.