Whenever you buy a new piece of computer hardware, whether it’s a CPU, memory, hard drive speed test, 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 speed tests being at their 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 the 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.
But if you already have some flash drive speed tests 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 eight free tools to benchmark your USB flash drives or media cards to give you an idea of how fast they are.
Top 10 Free USB Speed Test Software to Test USB Read and Write Speed
USB speed test software has become a very important tool, especially when you want to check the write and read speeds of USB flash drives or SD cards. Not only that, many devices now use USB ports to connect to a computer or other devices. With so many devices using USB, it’s important to know the quality of the USB connection.
These are some of the best free tools to test USB speed. To test the speed of a simple USB, please download the software, install it, and begin to test and measure the speed of your USB.
1. SpeedOut USB Speed Test Software
If you need to test USB speed, you need a tool called SpeedOut. SpeedOut is a small, simple, and portable tool to measure the read and write speed of your USB flash drives. It can run tests at a low level, no need to run them as an admin. This helps to show results as accurately as possible without being affected by the drive file system.
To use it, simply plug in your flash drive speed test, select it on the SpeedOut drop-down menu, and if you have more than one device, all of them will show on the menu. Next, run the test. SpeedOut will run 4 passes for both reading and writing tests, then display the average results for each.
You can save or copy the score to use later or compare it to other devices by simply right-clicking the title bar. SpeedOut is very clean and smooth too. It runs with no problems and leaves no footprints on your devices. You don’t need to format your drives to run tests and no files are overwritten inside the drives. If you want a quick way to test your USB drives with straightforward results, you should try this one.
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2. CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is probably the most famous USB tool to measure sequential and random performance (Read/Write/Mix). It can be used to test the performance of hard drives, SSDs, and USB drives. You can choose either portable, installer, or themed versions of the software.
Before you run the test, we recommend that you drop the default test size to 50MB/100MB and the number of passes to 1 or 2 for the slower flash drive speed test. CrystalDiskMark is designed for much faster devices that can satisfy many enthusiasts, so it can be very powerful.
3. USBDeview
USBDeview is created by Nirsoft and it’s a portable flash drive speed test software. With this tool, you can see the list of your USB devices. You can choose to uninstall any USB devices attached to your computer. For beginner users, the interface might feel overwhelming, but essentially, you only need to look for your main USB drive. Your USB device should be highlighted in green with a device type of “Mass Storage“. Right-click to open the menu and select Speed Test, or use hotkey Ctrl + T. It will start a sequential reading and writing test with a 100MB file and gather the scores.
4. USB Flash Memory Benchmark
The USB Flash Benchmark is a plain and simple speed testing program for USB flash drives. It will run a full set of benchmark tests for speeds from 1KB chunks up to 16MB. There is a nice graph at the bottom to show the results.
Sadly, the website to upload and compare your results is no longer available. The website alongside the database can’t be accessible anymore. But don’t worry, the program itself still works properly. You can run the portable program, select your flash drive, and press the button to run the test. The test will begin with a 16MB test first and continue down to a 1KB test. The test takes several minutes to finish. Don’t forget to uncheck the report button as it doesn’t do anything anyway.
The software is really great at presenting the USB speed testen results. There is a log that is updated in real-time, so you can see the results as the test is in progress. Really handy for advanced users. That being said, we don’t recommend using this software to test newer flash drives. There might be an error here and there.
5. FlashCheck out
Flash’s main function is to check the health of a USB flash drive. It can check whether the device has some bad sectors or has any kind of damage. But it can also run a read and write speed test. Additionally, it can use the more advanced logical or physical access type that allows flash drive erasing, and restore, and also customizing partitions. You can ignore the additional features, of course. If you only want to run a reading and writing speed test, you can do just so.
The “Use Temporary File” method is a two-test conducted in one run. The method uses temporary files to fill the remaining space on the flash drive and runs an error check while reading the read and write speed at the same time. Some programs don’t run this way, that is, without filling the drive with temporary files.
6. RMPrepUSB
RMPrepUSB is a great tool for testing USB speed. It has so many features compared to most other pieces of software. It can do so many different things to USB drives. Of course, the most important feature is the read and write speed test. Run RMPrepUSB and select your USB speed test from the top. Click the Test Speed button in the lower right to run the test. The software then runs RMPartUSB.exe to run the test by reading from and writing to a file of 63MB. The result will be saved to a CSV file. You can see the record of drives and scores from it.
7. Tester for Flash Drives/Cards
Last but not least, is the Flash Drive/Card Tester. It’s a tool to check your removable USB flash drives, Compact Flash cards, or SD cards for reading and writing errors while showing the speed of the drive at the same time.
Think of running multiple tests at the same time. This saves you quite a lot of time if you check multiple USB speed tests. The results are easy to read and are located at the bottom.
8. Parkdale
is a dependable disc speed test tool for determining read and write speeds from your SSD, HDD, SD Cards, USB Flash drive, or other devices. This tool is easy to use and it has a “QuickAccess” feature that allows you to test the file system with just a single click!
9. USB Flash Drive Examiner
This tool is powerful for testing the read and write speeds of SD, MMC, CF, and USB flash. This tool is completely free and you can download it at cnet.com. It is lightweight but reliable for the purposes of checking the speed of USB flash or SD cards and avoiding counterfeit products. Remember, there are currently many fake SD card products circulating on the online market.
10. Flash Memory Toolkit 10
The Flash Memory Toolkit is a powerful tool for checking USB speed tests, drives, or SD cards. This tool is a must-have. It runs on Windows, and you can download it for free for personal use. This tool helps you to check the read and write speed of the errors on the USB drive.