USB Thumb Drive Benchmark Suggestion?

[DaveLembke]

Was wondering if anyone had a suggestion for a good USB Flash Drive Benchmark that displays Read/Write speeds?

I have a hand full of thumb drives and would like to know which perform the best of the pile for use for running Linux on some systems without hard drives. In the past I have just grabbed a 8GB stick and made it a Linux bootable stick. But I figured why not try to pick out the better performing stick for this use this go around. I am upgrading from Linux Mint 17.1 to 17.3. I install Linux to the thumb drive and then allocate the remaining unused space for saving data and changes so that its more than just a Live Distro, that I can install updates and programs and save personal data. Using a generic no name 8GB now that i picked up cheap somewhere. Thinking the name brand ones might be better, but without guessing it would be neat to test the pile and see which are best for fast read/writes instead of trying to guess.

[patio]

http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/

[DaveLembke]

cool thanks... seen a bunch on google search, but im sure some come with bundled junk.

[patio]

NirSoft has been around for years...that's why i picked that one.

Let us know how it works...

[Calum]

The usual disk benchmark utilities will work, too, such as CrystalDiskMark.

[DaveLembke]

Cool thanks for that suggestion too with Crystaldiskmark.

A friend at work also pointed me to a russian made one that is safe that he used years ago when wanting to use ReadyBoost on his system and he has a hand full of thumb drives. I tried ReadyBoost years ago myself and didnt see any real benefit to it myself. If there was any benefit using it it was unnoticeable.  He pointed me to http://usbflashspeed.com/ which plots out the Read/Write Speed of USB Flash drives as well as it also works for Hard Drives internal as well as external USB hard drives and SSDs with different size blocks of data transferred.

Attached pics of the 750GB SATA II Hard Drive Benchmark and the 12 year old 164.7GB SATA I Hard Drive that is in use on this system.

Also I found a Team Brand USB 8GB in my pile that has a 20MB/s Read speed and 7MB/s Write speed so I will use that for Linux Mint 17.3. The others I had were around 12 to 16MB/s Read Speed and 4 to 6MB/s Write Speed. Also just for curiosity I ran the benchmark on a 256MB USB Iomega stick that I have had now for almost 13 years and that is a very slow 1MB/s by 1MB/s Read and Write Speed. I have been using it these days mainly for playing MP3 in my new 2016 model car that has a USB port to the car stereo and its perfect for MP3 play in the car. Other than that a 256MB USB stick is just about worthless given its limited capacity and looking at benchmark its extremely slow in comparison to modern USB sticks.


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[DaveLembke]

Here is the benchmark of the 12 or 13 year old 256MB Iomega USB stick I have that I only use for playing MP3s in car these days. Pretty slow, but fast enough back 12 years or so ago.    I have an even older 64MB USB Flash Drive too that I should test just out of curiosity. 

http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/ worked well for looking for average speeds. The plotting of speeds depending on data block size was neat in the other http://usbflashspeed.com/ ... both will detect and show which ones are faster than others. Gonna try the CrystalDiskMark and see how that one is too now.

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[BC_Programmer]

That looks like a nifty tool. I like the graph feature.

[Geek-9pm]

What does the green line mean?   Vegan ?

[BC_Programmer]

Green is the Read Speed, Red is the Write Speed.

[Geek-9pm]

OK. Some interpretation please. Does this mean that reading between about 16 kB and 1.5 MB is the optimum range?  What is being measure? File size.
No, it says  the file is 100 KB. So how can this graph help me?  What is the thing that varies?  Size of thumb dire? That can't be, nobody uses 16KB drives anymore.

The write speed dips at about 12KB. So I should avoid doing a write at 128KB?
I find the chart hard to understand. Do thumb drives really vary that much in speed?

Curious minds need to know.   

[BC_Programmer]

It is the chunk size being used to read/write from and to a 100MB file. It can vary at different sizes due to the Drive's memory controller, I presume.