Publisher Web Site: www.tcdlabs.com
HD Tach Web Site: www.tcdlabs.com/hdtach.htm
Cost: $0 to $49.95

HD Tach by TCD Labs has for a long time been THE hard drive benchmark, used for gauging hard drive performance. This extremely small program (about one megabyte) is available either as a fully functioning registered copy, or a freeware version that has some of the more advanced benchmarks disabled. This benchmark is great for testing access times and speeds of all types of hard drives.

As an example, we simply ran the benchmark on an IBM 45GB 75GXP IDE hard drive using the large disk option. Make sure that when you do so, you close any and all active programs before running this program as they will interfere with your results. In the free version one is only able to run read tests on a hard drive running under Win 9x. If you're using any variant of NT you'll need to register your copy for $50 which would enable NT support as well as write testing.

We performed the read test in our example, as you'll see in our pictures of this program. First, you'll notice the graph at the top where you can view the sequential speed as the program retrieves data from the disk starting near the center and moving on out. Had we run the write test, as well, you would have seen a green line on the same graph demonstrating the drive's write speed.

Next you will want to take note of the random access time. Moving on, this program will also record the read burst speed of the drive in terms of megabytes. Our drive was an ATA/100 drive, which is why we got a relatively generous score of 76 megabytes per second. And finally, the program will take note of the CPU utilization, where lower is better, as the drive will need less CPU power to achieve its goal.

MemTach Web Site: www.cpureview.com/mt_index.html
Cost: $0 to $20

The last benchmark we like to use for gauging memory performance would be a somewhat lesser known one by the name of MemTach. While its name sounds similar to HD Tach, this program is not produced by the same company. Unlike both Sandra and HD Tach, furthermore, this benchmark is available only as freeware. Don't let the absence of a price tag fool you, however, as this is an excellent memory performance benchmark.

To run the program, simply select which tests you would like to perform from the menu and hit start.

This benchmark is geared towards measuring the performance of one's RAM and providing a very detailed output. While having a slightly more detailed performance chart than that of Sandra 2001 it doesn't include any comparison benchmarks as found in Sandra. Please note that this program developed by William Henning of cpureview.com is still in beta and not considered final yet. Despite being in the beta stage we found no problems running it on our Windows XP RC2 machine.

Once again, we tried to limit this guide towards the beginner crowed and could not possibly cover all the memory benchmarking options out there. But we did try to cover the most viable options for the average person to use on his or her home computer. In our future benchmarking guides, we will cover ways to benchmark other subsystems such as CPUs and CD and DVD-ROM drives.

Ryan Wissman
Contributing Editor