Think your hard drive might be failing? Here’s how to test your SSD or HDD and catch problems early.

Is your hard drive running slow? Learn the common reasons behind sluggish performance and what you can do to speed it up.

For example, the 1 TB Micron 2600 NVMe SSD has sequential read/write speeds of 7,200 and 5,800 MB/s and random read/write rates of 740 and 1,000 kIOPs. Sounds great, yes?

Apart from using Task Manager to check the read and write speeds, you can also use third-party software to assess the speed of your USB flash drive or external hard drive on a Windows 11/10 PC.