I have been looking for a utility recently that would let me check my ever increasing collection of USB flash drives. Managing flash devices is a job in itself with small collections of data on these devices replacing the floppy disks and CD-R of old.

The speed of Flash drives can vary greatly so it would be handy to be able to get an idea of which were reasonably fast and which were slow. Of course we could run our own tests, copying files to and from and timing them but there must a be a quicker, and more consistent, way. This is what led the search for an appropriate utility.

Fortunately, My Digital Life has discovered a handy small (around 670KB) utility called Check Flash 1.08, to save re-inventing the wheel you can read more about Check Flash in the article Check Flash 1.08 – Flash Drive Performance Tester.

An important thing to mention is some of the tests, especially the ‘Physical Device’ tests may be unsafe if you need to keep the data on your drive but as My Digital Life point out it will give you the maximum information about your drive. The “Use temporary file” option is the safest of the three tests.

For the particular test on my 8GB memory stick I ran under the “Use Temporary File” option I was receiving write speeds of 3-4 MB per second and read speeds of around 30 MB per second.

The software can be run from the command line with a number of switches so it is worth reading through the associated Switches.txt file to get a good idea of what you can do with the program.

Check Flash 1.08 can be downloaded from Check Flash 1.08.

Whilst putting this post together I happened upon PaulSpoerry.com and MakeUseOf.com who have identified a number of other handy utilities as well as Check Flash.

• HD_Speed
• Crystal Disk Mark
• Flash Memory Toolkit
• HD Tune

You can read more about these applications in the article 3 Free Apps to Check the Speed of Your USB Flash Drive and 5 Apps to Check the Speed of Your USB Flash Drive (Windows).

I have yet to look at these other utilities but once I have had a good look into them I will post my thoughts about them. If you have tried any of them already let me know how you got on with them.

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