Top 5 Tools To Check The Speed Of Your USB Flash Drive

How do we go about checking the speed of USB flash drives? Maybe the following light and free software can lend a hand ?

Check Flash

The Check Flash website is in Cyrillic (there is an English option too) but it shouldn’t stop anyone from downloading this light and free USB flash drive speed testing and error checking software.

With Check Flash you can test, manage and format your USB flash drive.  You can also run a read-write cycle on your USB flash drive, which returns not only the speed but also any errors (read/write or physical) in your USB drive. The software does not rectify the problem but merely reports it.

Check Flash v1.07 runs as an 812KB sized executable and does not require an installation.

HD Speed

HD_Speed is a pint sized software that can be used to gauge the speed of data transfer on your hard disks, CD/DVD ROMS and USB flash drives. This program is compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista only, though it supports both FAT and NTFS volumes.

The 80KB utility does not require installation and runs with a click. Select the drive and hit start. The read/write results show up as a graph and also as real values.

Crystal Disk Mark

Crystal Disk Mark is another disk benchmarking tool that can double up as a USB flash drive speed tester. The screen is simple and gives readouts according to the type of tests performed.

Crystal Disk Mark can carry out sequential read/write tests (i.e. read/write data in order) or random 4KB/512KB reads/writes or text copy. The speed test results are displayed as large numerical in MB/s.The 396KB software runs as a standalone executable straight from the box and is compatible with Windows Vista/2003/XP.

Flash Memory Toolkit

Flash Memory Toolkit is advertised as a collection of utilities for flash memory devices. The toolkit includes options to get detailed device information, erase files and recover files lost after a format, hardware failure or an accidental deletion. Backup and restore functions along with our benchmarking task of measuring the read/write performance of the flash drive is available.

Unfortunately, the free standard version gives us only the ability to judge the Read speeds. To calculate both read/write speeds one has to upgrade to the Pro version. Even with this handicap, the ability to measure read speeds along with the File Benchmark feature (which calculates the time it will take to read or write files of various sizes to the device and returns the results as comparative graphs) is a nice help too.The 766KB software (v1.20) is installable on Windows 2000, XP, XP 64-bit, 2003 Server and Vista.

HD Tune

Similar to the aforementioned software, HD Tune also comes in the free and paid flavors. And again, the free version allows for only read speed testing of our USB Flash drives. It also gives a detailed disk information option along with an error scan.

For more advanced aspects one need to dole out for the pro version. If you disregard the missing features in the free version, it is a handy utility to have around because it gives us a lot of benchmarking information like the maximum, minimum and the average transfer rates (i.e. the read speed) along with access time, burst rate (defined as the highest speed at which data can be transferred from the drive to the OS).HD Tune v2.55 is available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server and Windows Vista.

USB 2.0 has a cutting edge data rate of 480Mbps, and it is rated 40 times faster than the now archaic, USB 1.1, which peaked at 12Mbps. Flash drives are catching up with most now hovering around the 30-40 MB/s mark.

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