Recently I visited WinToFlash website because I wanted to help a friend in creating a Windows installation bootable USB drive. At the bottom of the main page, I noticed a small top10 list of “USB Flash drives speed” that links to UsbFlashSpeed.com. The only website I know of that saves a list of USB speed test results is from Nirsoft made by USBDeview utility. The speed test made by USBDeview is very simple by writing a large file into the USB flash drive, and then reading back the same file to getting the read speed. As for UsbFlashSpeed.com, their USB Flash Benchmark tool called FlashBench works differently by writing and reading 3 times to get an average number on small files from 16MB down to 1KB.
UsbFlashSpeed.com website doesn’t really list “ALL” of the results even though the filter is set to “All. When you do that, it only shows the top 10 of the fastest Flash Drives (Read and Write) and the last 10 benchmarked USB flash drives. If you use the search function, only 50 will be displayed. Taking a look at the FlashBench tool, it is pretty straight forward and easy to use.
FlashBench is a free tool only 51KB in size with two dll files (iotest.dll and Thrift.dll) that must be placed in the same folder. It is portable and doesn’t require installation. Running the benchmark tool shows you the drive being selected to benchmark and clicking the Benchmark button will start the reading and writing process. Once the benchmark has been completed, you will be presented with a link to your online report IF you’ve checked the “Send Report” option.
The fastest USB flash drive currently listed in UsbFlashSpeed.com is Kingston DT Ultimate which is obviously because of the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 specifications. When I benchmarked my 128GB Corsair GTR with FlashBench, I noticed that the read and write performance has degraded, probably due to a lot of reading and writing cycles. I guess it was a big mistake in using it on my WD TV first generation.