hdtune

A great tool for the sort of basic disk benchmarking needed for databases on Windows system is hdtune, available at http://www.hdtune.com/ The program is free for a trial period, with a slightly limited feature set, and is modestly priced to purchase. The free features are sufficient for database hardware validation.

Here is what the output from hdtune looks like running the basic transfer rate benchmark on this disk:

These are respectable results from a single drive of any sort, particularly a laptop one. The left axis and the upper line graph is charting MB/s at that point on the disk. The right axis label is in milliseconds, and the scattered dots in the middle and bottom are showing the access time along points in the drive. Note how transfer speed falls and access speed rises as you move further along the logical part of this disk, into the slower ZCAV zones.

An average of 68.3 MB/s is in the middle range of what you'll see on drives as this book is being written...