As you sit there waiting for a large file or two to transfer from the local hard drive in your computer to a portable flash drive, do you ever wonder if the drives are operating at top speeds? USBFlashSpeed is a Windows application that will tell you exactly that, by measuring a drive’s read and write speeds.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

USBFlashSpeed will determine read and write speeds for any connected drive, internal, external, USB flash, etc. After calculating speeds you can upload them to an online database, which compares stats to community scores. This gives you a more accurate example of how well your drive is performing.

Pros

• Benchmark tool for internal and external drives, allows you to determine their read/write speeds and general health
• The collected drive stats can be uploaded to an online database and compared to scores from other drives
• Very easy to use interface, and the app requires very little interaction from end users
• Uses less than 5MB of RAM while running

Cons

• Once a benchmark has started, there’s no indication about how far along the process is (no percentage or completion rate displayed)
• If you want a more in-depth report about your drive you will need another tool, while this app does display read and write speeds that’s all you’ll get
  • Nothing about bad sectors
  • No fragmentation information
  • It would be convenient to see used space
  • In systems with varying USB ports, it would be helpful to see which type the device is connected to (USB 2.0, or 3.0)

Discussion

USBFlashSpeed is a portable application that comes in a compressed archive. You will need a tool like WinZIP, WinRAR or 7ZIP to extract the related contents. Once extracted, the application can be run from any directory by simply activating the executable.

There are two parts to this application, the offline drive analyzer and the online community. You don’t have to upload any information or use the online portion if you don’t want to.

The interface for the application is very simple, which means anyone can use this software. Then again you will need some knowledge about transfer speeds in order to understand the collected data properly. In addition, you can test drive speeds for any connected drive not just that of external flash drives.

To test a drive, you just need to select the appropriate drive letter from the top dropdown box. Information about the drive will automatically populate in the necessary list boxes. The app tells you the drive serial number, vendor, product ID, model, total size and more. Analyzing the drive speed is as easy as clicking a “restart benchmark” button. You should also select the “send report” checkbox if you want to upload the information to the online database and compare it with other scores.

Once a benchmark has been started, the application will test the drive rigorously with various read and write speeds. The top right portion of the main window will display and relevant results, while the data will also be entered into a visual graph.

If you publish the report info online, the application will return a URL once the benchmark has been completed. You can copy and paste this URL into an address bar to view the detailed report.

I find it to be very useful, especially since you can compare drive speeds and benchmark results to those of other drives. This allows you to correctly determine the read and write speeds of your hardware, and figure out if your drive is actually performing properly.

Conclusion and download link

USBFlashSpeed is a benchmarking tool for Windows that allows you to determine read and write speeds for your drives. It’s meant to be used with external USB flash drives, but you can actually use it with any drive connected to your system — internal or external. After scores have been calculated, you may then upload them to an online database in order to compare with scores from other drives. This information is to aid you in determining the performance and health of your drive. It’s easy to use, and requires little interaction from the end user. Although anyone could use this app, you will need a bit of knowledge about drive speeds to interpret the returned data, but that goes without saying.

Overall, if you are in the market for such a program, check this one out.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 

Supported OS: Windows 8/7/Vista/XP

Download size: 35KB (compressed), 87KB (unzipped)

VirusTotal malware scan results: 0/47

Is it portable? Yes

USBFlashSpeed Homepage