The speed difference of USB Flash Drives that support the USB 2.0 standard can be more than 15 MB/s with maximum speeds of about 30 MB/s for fast drives. That’s still less than modern hard drives are capable of but better than a few years ago. I think it’s really astonishing that there are only a few recent comparisons of USB flash drive speeds available on the first results pages of Google. A recent (another one) comparison from May 2008 that tested seven USB flash drives showed differences of more than 15 MB/s between the fastest and slowed drive while copying files of a certain size
If you already have an USB flash drive and want to know how it compares you can test the speed of it with the free version of HD Tune which can benchmark USB drives as well. The free version will only test the read speed and access time but it should give a good impression of the capabilities of the device at hand.
To make the test accurate you should set the test speed to Accurate in the benchmark options. The last two steps are to select the USB flash drive from the pulldown menu at the top and to click on start to start the benchmark.
Those speed differences are really interesting. It’s probably a good idea to research USB flash drives extensively before buying one. What’s your experience with those drives ?
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I had few high speed flash drives (apacer, corsair) until I bought 1.8″ external HDD. Advantages of flash drive (size, compatibility) just can’t beat 40-100Gb capacity with times better price per Gb.
here are my results ;)
http://i32.tinypic.com/1zvaik6.jpg
Is there something that will test SD and SDHC cards?
Sata 3g don’t get much faster than 30MB/s…
never do they get even 100MB/s
check your external usb hard drives with this same tool and you’ll see the same sucky speed
Esata is the way to go for speed, but most self powered 2.5″ are all lame usb 2.0
@Anonymous
My latest SATA drive shows around 95Mb read speed (of course real performance will be lower), that’s rather more than 30MB/s.
esata only had enhanced signal strength and modification to allow multiply devices on same port, no changes to data rate.
USB 2.0 is hardly lame. :)