Q: What is the most hard drive speed-intensive task? (Via Quora)
A: There are actually many, many tasks that can force a drive to work at full, no-holds-barred, flat-out, 100% read/write capacity, for an extended time. So there’s no one, single “most intensive task” — there’s actually a boatload of ’em!
In addition to obvious software such as artificial hard drive benchmarks, some ordinary apps can fully max out even solid state drives (SSDs).
For example: Run one or more virtual PCs inside a regular Windows setup. Update both the host and one or more guest machine(s) at the same time. Linux, Apple, Android — doesn’t matter what the mix is, you’ll probably soon see real-life 100% disk saturation — where the drive is working as fast as possible; at 100% capacity — and yet can’t get ahead of the tasks the rest of the PC is piling up for it.
For example, when I do the above on my Core i7 SSD-equipped PC, the drive will be pegged at 100% — full drive saturation with flat-out, full-bore activity for the duration — while the cpu remains lightly loaded at about 30% capacity.
When 100% disk saturation happens, the hard drive is the system bottleneck — it’s the component that’s preventing the PC from working any faster.
It’s positively easy to max out a hard drive — even a speedy SSD!
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