Only a few years back I learned that CrystalDiskMark is using Microsoft MIT-licensed diskspd for the actual measurements
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/25
I was looking for a way to measure Windows disk performance from the console as I was used to using the [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark GUI measurement tool.
So I was glad to learn a few years back at the end of 2022 that [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4c is based on [Wayback/Archive] DISKSPD 2.0.21a. Which back then was an older version as [Wayback/Archive] DISKSPD 2.1 had been released fall 2021.
I found this out via [Wayback/Archive] Performance benchmarking with CrystalDiskMark on Nutanix:
CrystalDiskMark is an open-source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows. Based on Microsoft MIT-licensed diskspd tool, this graphical benchmark is commonly used to test storage performance. It generates a workload with a varying number of queues and threads.
Finding that actually was a side effect ot my [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark summary – Google Search which I needed to create an initial version to support [Wayback/Archive] Portabe CrystalDiskMark similar to the current CrystalDiskInfo? · Issue #159 · mkevenaar/chocolatey-packages.
For such an important dependency, I was surprised this is not listed more prominently on the CrystalDiskMark home page.
[Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark – Wikipedia does show it though, which led me to the 20190406 version of the page where it is listed more prominently: [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark – Crystal Dew World
Benchmark Core
CrystalDiskMark 4-6 uses Microsoft DiskSpd (The MIT License).
Currently it is only a kind of byline in [Wayback/Archive] Acknowledgments – Crystal Dew World [en]:
Library
Why diskspd over CrystalDiskMark?
A good blog post on why CrystalDiskMark only has limited application is [Wayback/Archive] Flash testing tools – CrystalDiskMark:
CrystalDiskMark is the type of tool I wouldn’t even normally look at due to it’s focus market, but one of our SE’s asked about it last week, so…CrystalDiskMark is a tool you would normally see used on standalone hard disks/SSD, in particular on consumer focused websites like Toms Hardware – not on enterprise All-Flash Arrays.Diskspd
According to their website, CrystalDiskMark is basically just a front-end to [Wayback/Archive] Microsoft Diskspd. Unfortunately diskspd itself is not a good tool for testing storage that supports de-duplication – see my separate [Wayback/Archive] post on Diskspd for the full details, but in short :
- The initial test file written by Diskspd contains completely unique data
- The data written during write tests can be made somewhat unique, but requires massive amounts of memory to do so
CrystalDiskMark does actually make an effort to overcome the first of these issues, but unfortunately it’s target market means that it fails in countless other ways as a suitable tool for testing AFA’s.
That was actually the underlying reason I wanted to know about other tools, but the above rules out both CrystalDiskMark and diskspd for anything but consumer (and maybe even prosumer) hardware.
Now that I know that diskspd is also out as well as the predecessor SQLIO (see [Wayback/Archive] Flash testing tools – SQLIO), I need to look further (:
Too bad as at first sight, [Wayback/Archive] Using Microsoft DiskSpd to Test Your Storage Subsystem looked really interesting.
Anyway: a good reason to put [Wayback/Archive] Scott Howard – Scott’s Blog on my RSS feed list (:
Queries
- [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark summary – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] “diskspd” “crystaldiskmark” – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] “diskspd” site:crystalmark.info – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] flash testing tools site:blog.docbert.org – Google Search
--jeroen
PS: I should check out the status of [Wayback/Archive] Upgrade to use current version of DISKSPD 2.1 · Issue #23 · hiyohiyo/CrystalDiskMark.
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