How do you test USB speed?

[pcfountain]

I have an older Lian-Li case with USB ports on the front that used to run USB 1.1, but now I have installed a new setup in there and everything is USB 2.0 - how can I test my USB speed to make sure I am getting full 2.0 speeds?

 

[lmaro]

Maybe copy some files off a drive or USB stick? There might be a less experimental way of doing it.

 

[Socket7]

Connect a USB 2.0 device to the port. If the port is running USB 1.1, windows will tell you that your device can perform faster when plugged into a USB 2.0 port.

If you want to know actual throughput figures, you have to time the transfer of a file of a known size. Benchmarking programs can do this for you in some cases. Keep in mind that files of different sizes will transfer at different speeds due to overhead (1gb of 20Kb photos takes much longer to transfer then a 1gb ISO)

 

[pcfountain]

Yes I am planning to pick up a flash drive this weekend for testing. I know I have seen reviews where they use some kind of program to test and record the speeds ... anybody know what it is and the download location?

 

[jpmkm]

Not many USB flash drives actually transfer data fast enough to fully take advantage of USB2.0 speeds, so that probably won't be a good test. The physical specs for USB2.0 are pretty much the same as the specs for USB1.1, so your ports should be capable of USB2.0 speeds. If you don't actually have any USB2.0 devices that you can use to test your speeds then what difference does it make anyway?