You do not need a lab to work out whether your tills are being slowed by storage. You need a plan, a few free tools, and the discipline to test like for like.
If you are modernising store operations, platforms such as Retail Express help connect store data to head-office decisions, so faster, cleaner inputs from POS really do pay off. Keep that bigger picture in mind while you measure.
Start with what actually matters at the counter
- Time to sign in from a cold boot
- Time to POS-ready
- Time to open the POS app and load a large product file
- Time to write an end-of-day export
Synthetic scores are useful for comparisons, but the numbers that shorten queues are your task timings.
Set a clean baseline. Image one terminal with a fresh OS, the current POS build, and identical drivers. Clone that image to all test units. Disable Windows indexing and scheduled maintenance during the window. Keep networking and power consistent, because a slow link or a throttled CPU will hide a quick drive.
Use two kinds of tools. First, a simple synthetic to profile the drive. Second, a short script of store-like tasks. On Windows, Microsoft’s free DiskSpd lets you shape read and write patterns, set queue depths, and capture latency clearly. You can review setup tips and parameters in Microsoft’s DiskSpd guide
A lightweight workflow you can run in about an hour per device:
- Power on to login, then to POS-ready. Time both three times and keep the median.
- Launch the POS app and load a cached product list. Time to first scan.
- Export a day’s transactions to disk, then compress that file to stress sustained writes.
- Import a catalogue of at least 500 MB to the local drive.
- Reboot and repeat to capture warm-cache behaviour.
Keep your traffic-cop hat on. Change one factor at a time. If you compare two SSDs, hold CPU, RAM, BIOS, firmware, OS build, and drivers constant. Update SSD firmware before tests, then freeze it for all candidates.
Interpreting results is where teams often stumble. A drive that wins big on sequential throughput can still feel slow when the POS app hammers 4K random reads at shallow queues. Weight your decision toward median task times and random read latency at low depth, since that is what a cashier feels when a barcode hits the glass.
Watch for sustain. Many consumer-grade models fall off once their write cache fills. Expose that by running a ten-minute continuous write with DiskSpd, then re-running your task timings. For a broader, trace-based view of everyday responsiveness, this overview of PCMark 10 Storage benchmarks is helpful when you want to sanity-check what people will actually feel.
Now connect results to the business. Cost per saved second is your buy signal. If a drive upgrade trims 15 seconds from login and you have 20 tills turning over all day, that time compounds into more served customers and calmer colleagues. Document every setting, keep a golden image of the winner, and store your timing scripts with it for next year’s refresh.
If you’re also piloting AI merchandising to improve planning or trialling price-optimisation software to sharpen margins, these measurements become part of your data-quality foundation. Faster storage makes tills snappier, which produces cleaner data feeding your central systems, and that’s where the margin lives!