Flash drive is an important part of computer as it plays a crucial role. Get a detailed way to calculate flash drive speed over here.
USB flash drives are very popular nowadays and with capacity of these devices going beyond 64 GB, it is very important to buy drives which have faster read-write mechanism in order to transfer files to them quickly. If you buy a slow thumb drive, you might have to spend plenty of hours just to copy files to it. This will not only be a waste of your money but also time. For example, if a 64 GB pen drive writes only at 5 Mbps, then it will take hours to fill it with data. So you should check the read and write speed of flash drive before purchasing it, so that you won’t be wasting too much time in copying files.
You should look at the specifications mentioned in the device manual and test whether it’s able to achieve the same read/write speed. The speeds can generally vary depending on the price tags and brands. For instance, older USB 1.1 devices have read/write speed of 12 Mbps while USB 2.0 devices have an increased speed of 480 Mbps. There are several free tools available online which can help you in finding out the read and write speed of flash drives. Some of the common tools are,
USB Review
USB Device is a free and popular tool available for checking the read/write speed of thumb drives. It is a portable tool from Nirsoft which lists the list of USB devices and permits you to uninstall them safely. You can download the free software from the Softpedia website link below, http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/USBDeview.shtml. Once you install the software and open the application, it will show all USB devices which are connected to the computer.
Now select the USB drive for which you want to measure the read/write speed. When you right-click the drive, a pop-up window appears and all you have to do is click the Start Test button. Once the test is completed, the read/write speed of your drive will be displayed. Once the speed is measured, you can optionally upload the results of your Flash drive in the speed test page of Nirsoft.
Once you insert the USB drive it will show the category of the device as “Mass storage” and it gets highlighted in green color. Once you begin testing, the application will sequentially read and write files of 100 MB in order to obtain the read/write speed. Once done you can decide whether to publish the results on Nirsoft website or not.
Check Flash
Check Flash is another simple utility which allows users to format, manage and test the read/write speed of USB drives. The software allows you to measure not only read/write speed but along if any errors while copying data. It is a very small executable which can be downloaded from Checkflash website or Softpedia link below,
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Boot-Manager-Disk/Check-Flash.shtml
The Application does not require any installation and is very user-friendly. It’s one of the efficient tools for accurately measuring the read/write speed of flash drives.
HD_Speed:
It is another useful App which can measure the data transfer speed of different storage devices like CD/DVD ROMS, hard disks and USB thumb drives. It is compatible with different files systems such as NTFS and FAT and is also compatible with different operating systems like Windows Vista, XP and Windows 2000. It also provides visual reports like graphs for the read/write speed tests along with actual results. The executable size is just 80 Kb and does not require any installation.
Flash Memory Toolkit:
It is collection of tools for flash drives and includes various features like providing detailed information of the devices, option to erase and recover files after formatting the devices, accidental deletion or hardware failure. You can also backup and restore data to the device along with speed tests to benchmark the read/write performance of your USB thumb drive.
The free version can be used only to measure the read speed and if you want complete set of features, you should purchase the Pro versoin. The executable file is 768 Kb and can be installed in Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server. It is compatible with different file systems and also both 32-bit and 64-bit operating system.
Speedout:
It’s another portable application which can instantly measure the read/write speed of your USB flash drive with different techniques. The tool does not overwrite any files to the system and does not require formatting in order to run the read/write benchmarking test. Along with actual results it also provides detailed graphs based on performance and uses different size of files to measure the speed.
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