How to Test & Increase your USB Flash Drive Read, Write Speed

Why we didn’t care about USB flash drive specs? When you explore USB’s in the store, you see the multiple flash drives at different-different prices, the reason why company sold a 16GB and an 8GB USB stick at the same price is only for their performance & class. According to me, you always care about the manufacturer/brand for what the manufacturer is popular for, for ex. In flash drives, SanDisk is more popular. To increase the data transfer performance of a USB stick you need to backup your data first from your stick, remove any USB password protection if have. Some time your transfer data have a number of files, but less in size, which causes the slow transfer rate that’s looks like flash drive working slow.

Testing current Read & Write Speed

Usually you can see the transfer rate on screen while you copying files from computer to USB, but you didn’t get the maximum speed/rate of read and write that’s why i found some tools which help you to get the max. Transfer rate of your flash drive.

CrystalDiskMark : Tutorial

1. Download & install CrystalDiskMark
2. Connect your USB, and Run CrystalDiskMark
3. Select your drive, test size and no. Of tests count
4. And hit the “All’ button
5. Wait until it completes and finally you get your max. Read, write speed

Other Software’s

#1) USB flash benchmark : It is also a another light weight USB speed testing tool available freeware on web. Use of this tool is very simple, just select your drive and start Benchmark, once it completes it will show you a read & write speed report chart on screen.

#2) HD tune : HD tune is more advanced than above listed tools and also have many controls over read, write tests. The free version of HD tune didn’t test write speed, so you can try PRO instead.

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Archive your files

Boosting the file transfer rate of your flash drive on any computer/OS also depends to your data you’re currently transferring. Suppose if you’re transferring a single file of about 1 gigabyte to your USB and the transfer rate is about 15mb/Sec, but after you transfer multiple files, but the size is same 1 gigabyte, you see this time the transfer rate is lesser than 15bm/Sec because multiple files mostly become a cause of less writing speed.

To avoid this, you have to try some file compression tools which not just zip your multiple files into one, also decreases the size of your files. Here are some best file compression tools you need to try :

• 7zip
• WinRAR
• PeaZip

Transfer rate Test result after compression

We do a test, by transferring multiple files of total size 15mb and found compressed data saves 70% time than non-compressed data.

Switch to 3^rd Generation USB 3.0

USB 3.0 is a third generation interface that’s extremely powerful and improved data transfer rate compared to second generation sticks. If you compare data transfer rate between 3.0 and 2.0, you see the transfer speed on 3.0 is increased over 95%.

Before buying a third generation stick make sure your PC/laptop have at-least one such 3.0 port, because older computers only have 2.0 ports which not support third generation sticks. A new transfer mode SuperSpeed in third generation sticks can transfer data rate up to 625 MB/s.

Change removal policy to better Performance

One of the most common way to optimize USB speed is just change the removal policy Quick removal (default) to better performance on your storage device. Quick removal is set default on your windows system, it disables write caching on the device so you can easily eject the USB without using safely remove hardware notification and other hand Better performance enable write caching but you need to use safely to remove hardware notification. To change this policy:

1. Connect USB > Right click and select properties
2. On hardware tab, select properties of your device
3. On a volume tab, select populate > Find policy tab
4. Select Better performance and check “Enable write caching on the device”

Read the Specs before you buy a USB

Most of the people didn’t read the specification of a USB stick because there is nothing special, but when peoples found that pen drives are also comes in different classes, so it’s important to read specs now for all of you.

Shopping online will give you every single specification which you haven’t found on the box, packet of the pen drive, and also give information about the transfer rate for what you’re searching for.

Remember points to avoid low transfer rate:

• Don’t go for USB’s comes at very cheap price
• Choose a brand that popular for flash drives
• Always ZIP all of your files before start transfer
• Switch to USB 3.0
• Close background running programs, which eating so much RAM