In that case, the only sure-fire method to determine your real-world hard disk speed is to put it through a reliable hard drive performance test.Īnd once you have the benchmark results, we'll point out what are the numbers to look for and what they mean in plain English. speeds attained under unrealistic scenarios). Ask any techie and chances are they will tell you that hard disk speeds given by manufacturers are often overstated or misleading (e.g.