5 Apps to Check the Speed of Your USB Flash Drive (Windows)
Recently, I bought a new USB flash drive and wanted to know whether the specs matched up to what it can actually do. Usually these days most USB flash drives are advertised as USB 2.0, but the brands among the bunch come with differing price tags.
Some of it can be put on the shoulders of brand marketing, but mostly it is the difference in specifications and features that accounts for the toll on your wallet. Some come bundled with security software offering iron-clad privacy and some have memory capacities to tout. But hidden among these is the value of data transfer rates (reading and writing) capable from these flash devices.
So 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.
So have you checked the speed of your USB flash drive lately? Which software have you used? Share with us in the comments…
(By) Saikat is a techno-adventurer in a writer's garb. When he is not scouring the net for tech news, you can catch him on his personal blog ruminating about the positves in our world.
omg, ty!
That’s cool. but once you find out the speed what can you really do with that?
i was looking for something like this the other day… i like free, self executable progs.
Actually I’m really happy to see you guys closinjg in on 50,000 Feedburner Readers. Add that to Rss and you’ve got a real substantial following.
NO love for HD Tach…..
…. I love that program.
You forgot one of the best: Atto disk benchmark
If you have vista it shows the write speed as part of Windows explorer.
The whole idea of testing is to compare 2 or more flash drives.
Of the suggestions, I think chkflash is probably the best since it doubles as a stress test for the flash device. Flash Memory Toolkit is one of the worst since the write module just writes the same data on the same sectors over and over again, and doesnt attempt to write random data
Finally i’ve got something to check on my flash/thumb drive..
cool article and also some essential and necessary information esepcially for falshdrive users
How do these check the speed? I read about 1 called “check flash” which appears to actually destroy all your data which is on the disk before! Not something I want to do in order to check the speed!
Are any of these safe? Please can you advise!
It is always preferable to backup up your data before conducting any type of tests and do the tests on an empty Flash drive. As far as I tested them, I found them to be safe. With Check Flash, during the read and write test it fills the flash drive up with a temporary file to make sure the flash drive is the size that it says it is.
thank you very good
That’ amazing .. Many thanks
Excellent writeup !
Nice collection!
I have noticed that Check Flash probably doesn’t support more than 4 GB of Flash memory. It gave me some sort of confirmation before starting the test.
AVG says HD Speed is infected
It is reported to be a false positive. But if you have concerns, it’s always safer not to use it.
Have you tried Flash Drive/Card Tester from http://www.vconsole.com
its free and low on frills but does the job.
It just told me that my supposedly “high-speed” flash writes at 12mb/s and reads at a shade under 18mb/s. Pretty pathetic if you want to boot of it.
You can also try this one:
http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net
the 2nd on the list HD SPEED was deletet and blocked by my security as being a trojan!
Useful apps.
I down loaded HD Speed. Avg said the file had a virus so I deleted it.
Another great app to check speed of USB drive and even to test it for errors and bad blocks is HDDScan.
Moreover, it’s completely free.
All the best,
Dave