Blackmagic Download for Mac 3.3

The Blackmagic disk speed test is an easy-to-use tool to quickly measure and certify the performance of your hard drive. Designed for Macintosh, this tool uses a standard method to determine the reading and writing speed of your hard disk.

In order to do this, it only fills in the free space on your hard disk by a sample of data and begins the assessment to determine these two parameters. Note that this test is particularly useful to certify the performance of your hard disk for working with high-quality video.

How to Run the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

When you are ready to test Mac’s internal or external drive:

• Launch disk speed test from the Applications folder or by using the Launchpad on the Dock only for Mac.
• Click the Settings button located above the Start button.

• Click Select Target Drive in the drop-down menu.

• In the left panel of the Finder screen, choose the disk or Mac volume you want to test, then click Open.

• Click the Settings button, then choose the size of the Stress file the application uses. Options range from 1 GB to 5 GB.

• Click the Speed Test Start button and watch as the information loads on the screen.

Notes: The entire test takes about 16 seconds, but it repeats over and over again. To stop the test, click the Start button.

Disk Speed Test – Results

The “How Fast?” results panel shows the frame rates your drive can achieve in frames per second and should be read in conjunction with the “Will it Work?” panel. If the “Will it Work?” panel shows a green checkmark for 2K 1556@25fps in 10 Bit YUV 4:2:2, but the “How Fast?” panel shows that a maximum of 25fps will be supported, the disk storage performance is too marginal to be reliable. A faster disk array or a less demanding video format should be used for reliability. SSD storage does not fluctuate much in speed and so an SSD disk array would not need to perform much faster than the video format. However conventional hard disks slow down significantly as they fill up and a larger safety margin is required for reliability. In this example, it would be best if a conventional disk array of hard drives showed performance of at least 30fps to be safe. The “How Fast” results panel also enables you to see how many streams of video can be supported by your disk storage. If the result for “HD 1080” is 70, you can run up to 70 frames of HD 1080 video per second.
This storage speed is capable of supporting the following video formats:

• 2 simultaneous streams of 1080i50 video at 25 fps per stream
• 1 stream of 1080p50 video at 50 fps per stream
• 1 stream of 1080p59.94 video at 59.94 fps per stream

Important note about Solid State Disk (SSD) speeds
Some models of SSD cannot save video data at the speed indicated by the manufacturer because the disk uses hidden data compression to reach these higher write speeds. This data compression technique can only save data at the manufacturer’s claimed speed when storing simple files or simple data, such as blank data. Video data includes video noise and more random pixel data which does not compress much, so the true speed of the disk is seen.

Some SSD’s can have up to 50% lower write speed than the manufacturer’s claimed speed, so even though the disk specifications claim an SSD is fast enough to handle video, in reality, the disk is not fast enough for real-time video data capture. Hidden data compression mostly affects capture and often these disks can still be used for real-time playback.

Use the Blackmagic disk speed test to measure accurately if your SSD will be able to handle uncompressed video capture and playback. Disk Speed Test uses data to simulate the storage of video so you get results similar to what you will see when capturing video to a disk. This will let you find models of SSD that work well for video capture. In our testing, we have found larger newer models of SSD, and larger capacity SSD’s are generally faster. Blackmagic disk speed test results also test the speed of disks connected to eSATA docks and other interfaces, which can affect disk performance.

Pros and Cons of Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

System Requirements For Blackmagic Disk Speed Test