How to find out the speed of reading / writing a flash drive (we determine the real speed of work)

User question

Hello.

Not so long ago on AliExpress I ordered a 32 GB flash drive. It seems to work, but the information on it is copied for a very long time (although it supports USB 3.0 and I connect it to the same port).

Tell me how to check a USB flash drive, is everything in order with it, what is its real speed of work?

PS I seem to have begun to understand why many products on AliExpress are so cheap ...

Hello.

Unfortunately, the store itself has nothing to do with it - you could buy a USB flash drive of inadequate quality in any other place (here you’re so lucky). Although, of course, buying flash drives of famous brands (Adata, Kingston, Sandisk, etc.) is unlikely to run into various dirty tricks ...

And so, below in the article I will consider the testing process in several utilities that will help you check the operation of your flash drive. Let's start ... 👌

How to determine the real speed of a flash drive

Method 1: using a quick test in CrystalDiskMark

Official website: //crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

DiskMark is a compact small utility, but very effective in terms of testing various drives: hard drives (HDD), SSD-drives, flash drives, memory cards, etc.

Allows you to very quickly get real data on the speed of read / write from the disk. It does not need installation, it is enough to extract the archive and run the executable file. Below is a small instruction on how to test a USB flash drive in it.

first connect the USB flash drive to the USB port and run the utility;
then set the parameters: choose the number of passes (I chose 1, for objectivity, set it more), the file size (for flash drives, I recommend setting 100-200MiB), and specify the drive letter;
start test start - button ALL;
DiskMark - getting started
after a while you will see numbers in two columns Read and Write (read and write, respectively). You need to navigate by the first line Seq Is the sequential speed of writing, reading.
Reading speed - 37MB / s, writing - 7MB / s (screenshot of the DiskMark window)

Method 2: using USB-Flash-Benchmark

Official site: //usbflashspeed.com/

Softpedia (download link): //www.softpedia.com/

An excellent utility for testing flash drives of different manufacturers and modifications. On the official website of the utility program, you can familiarize yourself with the test results of other flash drives, find the fastest drives (very convenient, by the way!).

USB-Flash-Benchmark does not support Russian, but it is quite simple to use. I will consider the steps.

1) Insert the USB flash drive into the USB port of your computer / laptop. Please note that if your flash drive supports USB 3.0, connect it to the USB 3.0 port as well (usually, such ports are marked in blue).

Another case in point: USB 2.0 and USB3.0

2) Download and run the USB-Flash-Benchmark utility (you don't need to install it, just extract the archive).

3) Next, in the utility, select the drive letter (our USB drive) and press the button "Benchmark" (see the screenshot of the window below).

By the way, please note that by selecting the required drive, you will see all the information on it: serial number, manufacturer, model range, VID, PID, real size. The information is very useful, by the way.

During testing, do not work with a USB flash drive and do not interrupt the program.

USB-Flash-Benchmark - start of testing

4) It took about 5-7 minutes to test my flash drive. time (the time depends on the size of the flash drive and the speed of the port). In the results, you will see a graph with averages for each file size (16, 8, 4 MB).

By the way, pay attention to the link "Report Link" ... I highly recommend that you open it, the site will present your average information on the test.

Test results // pay attention to the "Report Link"

5) Here, in fact, are the numbers themselves: approximately 32.1 MB / s - reading speed, and 12.03 MB / s - recording speed.

The numbers, frankly, are small, but the flash drive belongs to the budget options, and is rarely used.

The test results of my Toshiba flash drive on the utility website (data are averaged)

Method 3: check the Check Flash for speed and errors

Developer site: //www.mikelab.kiev.ua/index.php?page=PROGRAMS/chkflsh

Check Flash - drive is being checked

This is a free utility that will check not only the speed of a flash drive, but also evaluate its performance and check for errors. The utility supports almost all types of USB flash drives. It does not need installation, it supports the Russian language in full.

In addition to directly checking for errors and speed, Check Flash can edit information about partitions, save and restore images of a partition (or the entire disk as a whole), completely erase the contents of a drive (so that no one can recover anything from it).

To get started: just insert the USB flash drive into the USB port, run the utility and specify the drive letter for it, press the button "START" .

Next, the test will start, you just have to wait. By the way, the utility works for a long time. If I check it myself, I usually don't wait for the end (10-15 minutes) - get objective results (if there are no errors, most likely everything is in order with the drive).

👉 Note: the speed of verification and operation of the utility (according to the developer's assurance) is equal to the maximum speed of your drive.

It is not uncommon to find flash drives in the sale in sizes of 300-500 and even 1000 GB (it all depends on the seller's imagination and the buyer's credulity)!

Moreover, no one bothers that their cost is very low (by the way, this is found, most often, in various Chinese stores). I want to warn you: in many cases, the actual volume of the flash drive will be much less! You can find out how to check your flash drive for real volume from the article below.

👉 To help!