Especially for gamers, the storage test tool shows how fast your drive is for gaming.

3DMark has added a new storage benchmarking tool to its suite of applications designed to test SSDs in real-world gaming conditions. The new 3DMark Storage Benchmark now comes in the app bundle and you can also get it as a standalone product from Steam.

The developer states that players can choose from a wide variety of SSDs, from hybrid drives to SATA and NVMe options. But the problem is that many storage performance measurement tools have been developed for hard drives instead of SSDs. Almost all of these tools also use synthetic workloads to measure performance, which can skew results compared to real-world use of SSD.

The new drive benchmarking tool eliminates all these issues by directly supporting all the latest storage technologies from the start. Additionally, the tests will focus specifically on real-world gaming performance rather than using a synthetic workload. The storage process effectively consists of input and output operations. 3DMark states that it is possible to record these processes, called traces, while the SSD is performing a task.

The 3DMark Storage test uses traces from popular games to measure real-world gaming performance:

Battlefield V loadout from opening to main menu.
Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 download from opening to main menu.
Overwatch loading from opening to main menu.
Recording 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.
Installing The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games Launcher.
Saving game progress in The Outer Worlds.
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.