AJA KONA System Test 9.0

AJA KONA System Test is a utility to test the performance of your hard drives. It can scan both internal and external hard drives and even mounted volumes.

There are different types of scans (or tests) available. The regular test, called "Disk read/write", writes a dummy file on your hard drive and it analyses how fast the file was written on it; then it reads the file and it keeps a record of how fast that was done. When the scan is finished, you will see the average write and read speeds in megabytes per second. You can change the size of the file used to test your drives. The available sizes range from 128 megabytes to 16 gigabytes. There is another test that lets you select a file on your hard drive to test how fast it can be read. The last three tests are more specific and they deal with performance testing when sweeping video frame sizes, binary frame sizes and sweeping file sizes.

There are many uses for this application. In my case, I stumbled upon it when I needed to check the speed on a new USB3.0 external hard drive. The whole operation was as easy as selecting the hard drive from the list of mounted volumes and clicking on "Start". The results were easy to read and the test was done in just a few seconds.