Your hard drive is one of the most important components on your PC, which is why a slow hard drive can drag down the performance of your entire Windows system. To identify the hard drive bottlenecks that are slowing your system down, you need a specialised piece of software, such as CrystalDiskMark. This application has been designed to help you find detailed performance information about your hard drive, and it has the power to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. You can manually select the number of test runs to perform, the size of the test and the drive that will be analysed and then click the corresponding button to start all the tests. The tests take a couple of minutes to complete, and when they are done the results are displayed in the user friendly interface.