Testing Flash Drive Speeds

[DeaconFrost]

Is there any good, reliable testing apps that would tell me which of my flash drives is the fastest, and would even split out the speeds in terms of read and write? If so, would I need to leave data on the drives, or should they be empty?

 

[Shadowssong]

HD Tune will benchmark your flash drives for you.

 

[Bahamut]

HDTune won't do write testing on Flash devices, from what I can tell (just tried it with HDTune 4.01 and a 2GB USB stick, partitions removed). No matter how many times I restart HDTune and check with diskpart to make sure that stick is totally clean of everything including partitions, HDTune still won't do the write testing.

Crystal DiskMark does do write-testing on Flash devices, however. I just tried it on the same 2GB stick and, while it does work, it takes a very long time to set up the test file on the stick but of course that depends on the stick itself. This Kingston 2GB stick took nearly 11 minutes to get set up before the actual testing began, so, it's not recommended I guess unless you're really really patient.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I used the latest portable version of CrystalDiskMark (not running off of the flash drives, of course). You aren't kidding that it took a long time to prepare.