Data transfer rates (reading and writing) among flash devices can vary wildly and often the cost of a drive can be based on the read/write speed of the device (among other things like built in encryption, etc). So how do we go about checking the speed of USB flash drives to see if you’ve gotten the bang for your buck? The three tools below are free utilities that help you benchmark your USB flash drive performance.

Checkflash

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. Snag Checkflash from MikeLab.

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