Whenever you buy a new piece of computer hardware, whether it’s a CPU, memory, hard drive etc, one of the factors that will help to determine your purchasing decision would be the performance of the component. With hard drives and SSD drives, you will be looking at capacity and read/write speeds, and it’s a similar story when you purchase a removable memory card or USB flash drive.
Apart from having to worry about USB drives being the full capacity and not being fake if you buy from somewhere like eBay, the performance of a flash drive can vary by massive amounts depending on manufacturer and the type of memory used. If you buy a slow USB flash drive with a high capacity, it could literally take hours to fill it up completely.
Simplest tasks in Mac OS X that I would normally do from my Windows laptop—like show the connection speed for the current Wi-Fi network. How to Test USB Speed on PC or Mac. This wikiHow teaches you how to find the read and write speeds of a USB drive in Windows or macOS. Connect the USB drive you want to test. USB ports are usually on the side or front of laptops, and on.
But if you already have some USB flash drives in hand, do you know how fast they actually are at reading and writing? A drive that only writes at 5-6MB/s could take a while to copy large files like movies, whereas a fast USB3 flash drive could do the same copying tasks much faster. Here’s a selection of 8 free tools to benchmark your USB flash drives or media cards to give you an idea of how fast they are.1. USBDeview
USBDeview is a portable utility by Nirsoft that lists or allows you to uninstall current and any previous USB devices attached to your computer. Another feature is the option to benchmark a flash drive and optionally publish the results to the Nirsoft Speed Tests webpage for viewing and comparison. One of the good things about USBDeview is it’s still actively supported and updated.
Find your USB device which should be highlighted in green with a device type of “Mass Storage”, right click on it and select Speed Test (Ctrl+T). Click Start Test and it will sequentially read and write a 100MB file to get the scores. Then you can choose to publish the test results if you wish by clicking the button and ticking the box to agree to publish the results.
Download USBDeview
2. SpeedOut
SpeedOut is a small, simple and portable tool that can quickly measure the sequential read and write speed of your flash drive. The program runs the tests at a low level (needs to be run as admin) which means the scores aren’t affected by the drive file system.
Simply choose your USB drive from the drop down if you have more than one, and SpeedOut will run 4 passes for both reading and writing tests, then display the average for each. The scores can be saved or copied by right clicking on the title bar. SpeedOut is non destructive meaning no files are overwritten and the flash drive doesn’t need formatting to run the test.
Download SpeedOut
3. USB Flash Benchmark
This is a plain and simple speed testing program for USB flash drives which will run a full set of benchmark tests for speeds from 1K chunks up to 16MB, and show the results in a graph. USB Flash Benchmark used to have a companion website to upload results to a database, but that website is no longer available.
Just run the portable program, select your flash drive and press the button. The test will begin with the 16MB test first and continue down to the 1KB test. Be patient as the test does take several minutes to complete. You may as well uncheck the report button as it doesn’t do anything anymore.
Download USB Flash Benchmark
4. CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is a good all round tool for testing the performance of hard drives, SSD drives and also USB flash drives. It’s also the tool we used to test RAM disks for their read and write speeds. Portable, installer, and themed versions are available.
For testing slower USB flash drives we recommend dropping the default test size to 50MB/100MB and maybe the number of passes to 1 or maybe 2, then it won’t take so long to complete the test. For faster drives that can be increased to 500MB/1GB. After selecting the USB drive from the drop down list, you can run all 4 tests by clicking All or select a Sequential/4K test to run individually. For USB drives storing media like music, video or photos, the 4K scores are probably not going to be needed.
Download CrystalDiskMark
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5 Free Tools to Check and Test USB Flash Drives5 Tools to Test and Detect Fake or Counterfeit USB Flash Drives13 Free RAM Disk Tools Benchmarked for Read and Write Speed6 Free Tools to Test and Benchmark Your Network Speed10 Free Tools to Measure Hard Drive and SSD PerformanceCrystalDiskMark is rubbish for testing the write speed of USB flash drives. It only records the initial write speed (e.g. 28MB/s) which eventually drops to around 17.5-19MB/s. Am I the only one noticing this?
ReplyMy recently bought Sandisk Ultra 128GB USB3.0 gives a CrystalDiskMark write speed of 28MB/s but this does not represent real world results.
Upon copying 3GB of mp4 files the write speed started off at 28MB/s but eventually dropped to 24MB/s, 20MB/s, 19MB/s, 18MB/s, etc.
The file sizes were 995MB, 748MB, 730MB, and 644MB. The 3119mb of data took 164 seconds to transfer, which equates to an average transfer speed of 19MB/s. For larger transfers (e.g. 5GB+) the speed drops below 18MB/s.!
Replythat depend on the random write speed and the cache, you should try change the setting’s for accurate output depend on your daily use.
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ReplyCrystalDiskMark is widely regarded as one of the best tools around for benchmarking any sort of drive. It depends entirely how you set CrystalDiskMark up. The more passes and bigger test size you give it, the more accurate it will be because it flattens any issues with caching etc.
We recommend a small test size and fewer passes in the article because if you’re testing a slow drive of 3-5MB/s, it could otherwise take hours. For a faster drive you can use maybe 3/5 passes and 100/500MB test size to get a more representative score.
ReplyShould it have the same rate of (Ex: 24MB/s) when we are copying a file to the usb drive? I have copied nearly 6GB but when it copying to the usb, the writing speed boosts up to 25-30 MB/s and getting lower as 100-500Kb/s alternately. The graph is like a wave.
Replyhello thanks
ReplyCan “DiskMark (64bit)” do this job?
ReplyDo you mean CrystalDiskMark 64-bit? If so, then yes of course it can.
Replyhow to speed up transfer by program, some software solution Windows 98 iso for vmware.
Replythanks Raymond :D
Reply
I’ having CrystalDiskMark and it does measure speed of non removable drives only eg SATA
ReplyCrystalDiskMark works on just about any removable drive including USB hard drives, USB flash drives and SD memory cards etc. Make sure you plug the drive in before starting the program.
ReplyIt does not.
I have 2 usb hubs (for sd cards) and both are not recognised by CrystalDiskMark (Version 7.0.3). Tried both the 32 as the 64bit application.
Tried with a sd card in the reader and without.
OOPS. I’m running CrystalDiskInfo and not CrystalDiskMark. Sorry. will try that :)
ReplyI don’t want a tool that checks the speed on my USB drive. I need a tool that checks the max transfer speeds of the PORT itself, independently of a USB drive. How can i do this? None of the tools listed above serve this function.
ReplyI have never heard of a tool and know of no such way to test the speed of the port itself, you can only test the speed of a device attached to the port, it’s the same for every hardware controller in your computer.
ReplyThere would need to be a “wrap” tool that would plug in to the USB connector. It should be easy to design and would basically reverse the data out and data in wires. Would not need the power wires, since there would be no logic. The test driver would have to handle the data transfer sequencing, since a normal driver would probably puke.
Replywell thats only possible with a oscilloscope, looking at the waveform and how the clockrate is dynamically changed.
Asrock does some motherboards with an optional usb software that is called “xfast usb” it just oveclocks the usb serial bus clock to run data faster, which pushes the error rate up and might corrupt more than help and so on and on…
For your test it is easy and cheaper just to get the outmost fastest usb 3.0 stick possible and then just benchmark usb average transfer speed and use the fastest combiantion as reference sample speed 100%…
it is not important how far a stone can fly if you can’t throw it hard enought to go that fast, realworld vs. laboratory (not scientific usb speed on paper).
Can you please tell us why you would like to know the usb speed itself?
Google: propagation delay, error correction, serial bus, parallel bus and logic analyser, oscilloscope and you get the idear
ReplyThanks Raymond, you certainly bring in something simple, easy and different always.
ReplyThanks for the information. I’ve been looking for a portable flash drive.
Replyreally nice information, thanks ray
ReplyI am using USBDeview long time but did not know about the speed test. Good tip.
Thanks.
nice information ray! looks good!
ReplyThanks Ray, Nice Info.
ReplyThanks for sharing raymond, another nice tool.
ReplyMany thanks Raymond – another brilliant tool to help us overworked techies !
ReplyThanks Ray for this info…
ReplyNice information Ray.
I also want to measure my friend’s pendrive speed with this software….
Thanks for sharing Mr. Raymond
very nice
Replythanks Ray. you rock :)
Replythanks ray this is nice.
ReplyThanks for sharing Raymond. I will use it to check the speed of my Flash USB. Thank you! :)
ReplyLeave a Reply
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