HD Tune opens up with the Benchmark screen displayed by default. From here you can select which drive to work with (if you have more than one) including any external drives. Across the top, from left to right, you will see the hard drive selection panel with drop down menu, current hard drive temp and four icons. The first three icons provide various methods for saving/recording results and the fourth leads to a simple ‘options’ window:
The ‘Benchmark’ section (under Options) provides a simple slider for balancing the benchmarking process between speed and accuracy – the default setting would be best for most.
The ‘Temperature’ section allows users to display current temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit, or both. It also provides a “Critical Temperature” setting which is at 55C by default but can be changed by the user to suit:
Next are tabs to open the various sections:
Info - provides some useful details about the hard drive:
Health - reports on the status of a variety of hard drive functions and health in general:
Error Scan – scan the selected drive for bad sectors, healthy blocks display Green and damaged blocks Red:
Benchmark - provides performance statistics for: transfer rate, access time and burst rate:
Results can then be recorded/saved by three methods:
1) Copy information to clipboard
2) Copy screenshot to clipboard
3) Save screenshot (to hard drive - you select the save location)
For an interesting exercise; use HD Tune to create benchmarks before and after defragmentation and then compare the results.















