Tag: benchmarking

Categories
Mac

Mac SSD speeds

There have been some complaints recently about speeds of SSD drives built into Mac computers, mostly MacBook Pro and Air. Supposedly current models are much slower than earlier models, sometimes as slow as only 50% of the transfer rates.

As I was curious I benchmarked mine. I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test which is available for free from Apple’s App Store.

I got 416 MByte/s for writing, and 474 MByte/s for reading for my 512 MB SSD drive, which I consider pretty fast:

 

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test results

I have a MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013 with 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7. My SSD is a APPLE SSD SD512E Media which is obviously made by SanDisk.

What about yours? Please comment here in my blog, giving your machine and SSD details.

Categories
Computers Networking

How to properly benchmark your broadband connection

Since a while my broadband connection gets slow frequently, so I wanted to perform regular benchmarking probes and create a graph to illustrate the actual uplink and downlink speed.

Your first approach to this might be to download and upload a payload, measure the time this took, and divide the sizes of the files you downloaded and uploaded by the times it took. But this approach is seriously flawed… Why? Simple. In a usual scenario you have a router that terminates your internet connection, so eventually other LAN clients will cause traffic at the same time you’re performing your probe. This would “limit” the bandwidth you have for your probe, and thus artificially reduce the speed you calculate.

So how to do it properly? You should ask your internet gateway (your router) for the traffic it sees.

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