A great tool for the sort of basic disk benchmarking needed for databases on Windows system is HD Tune, available at http://www.hdtune.com/. The program is free for a trial period, with a slightly limited feature set, and is modestly priced to purchase. The free features are sufficient for database hardware validation.
Here is what the output from HD Tune looks like running the basic transfer rate benchmark on this disk:
These are respectable results from a single drive of any sort, particularly a laptop one. The left axis and the upper line graph is charting Mbps at that point on the disk. The right axis label is in milliseconds, ...
