USB Speed Test: How to Do It & Best Tools

Today, we’ll show you the best USB test software and how to easily check your USB speed.

Whether you’re testing a pendrive or a USB flash drive, knowing your device’s speed is key for fast file transfers.

We’ll also guide you on how to test USB speed on Windows 10 and share helpful tips for accurate results.

Best USB Speed Test Tools

1. MiniTool Partition Wizard – USB speed tester for Windows 10

Minitool partition wizard USB scan page

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a comprehensive partition software that allows you to test the health and performance of your USB drives.

After connecting your USB drive, you can select it from the list of available disks and right-click to choose “Surface Test.” The software scans the entire drive and identifies any performance-affecting errors.

For more details on how to perform this test, you can refer to How to Check and Test USB Flash Drive.

Download MiniTool Partition Wizard

2. USBDeview – easy-to-use USB speed benchmark tool

nirsoft usbdeview

USBDeview, a portable utility by Nirsoft, lists current and previous USB devices attached to your computer. It also lets you benchmark a flash drive and optionally publish the results.

USBDeview is actively updated and allows you to select your USB device to test its speed with a 100MB file. For more on this tool, visit 12 File Copy Software Tested for Fastest Transfer Speed.

Download USBDeview

3. SpeedOut – reliable tool to test USB speed on Windows 10

speedout benchmark

SpeedOut is a lightweight tool that tests the sequential read and write speeds of your flash drive. It works by running tests at a low level, meaning the file system doesn’t affect the scores.

The program runs four passes for both reading and writing tests and displays the average for each.

Download SpeedOut

4. USB Flash Benchmark – straightforward USB tester

usb flash benchmark

This simple program runs a series of benchmark tests for your USB drive, ranging from 1K chunks up to 16MB.

It helps you visualize the results in a graph. Although the website for uploading results is no longer available, the program still offers reliable testing.

Download USB Flash Benchmark

5. CrystalDiskMark – Tests USB speed while checking for errors

crystaldiskmark usb

CrystalDiskMark is a good all round tool for testing the performance of hard drives, SSD drives and also USB flash drives. It’s also the tool we used to test RAM disks for their read and write speeds. Portable, installer, and themed versions are available.

For testing slower USB flash drives we recommend dropping the default test size to 50MB/100MB and maybe the number of passes to 1 or maybe 2, then it won’t take so long to complete the test. For faster drives that can be increased to 500MB/1GB.

After selecting the USB drive from the drop down list, you can run all 4 tests by clicking All or select a Sequential/4K test to run individually. For USB drives storing media like music, video or photos, the 4K scores are probably not going to be needed.

Download CrystalDiskMark

6. Check Flash – Lightweight USB info and speed test tool.

The main function of Check Flash is to scan a USB flash drive for possible errors, but it also runs a read and write speed test while doing so. In addition, using the more advanced logical or physical Access types allows flash drive erasing, backup and restore and also partition editing.

check flash

The “Use temporary file” method is non destructive and will fill all the remaining space on the drive with a temporary file and then perform an error check on it while recording the read and write speeds. The file will be limited to 4GB for FAT/FAT32. Because all the available space is utilized, this test could take a while on empty larger flash drives. Check Flash is portable and also has some command line options in Switches.txt.

Download Check Flash

7. Flash Drive/Card Tester – Portable USB speed tester with clear results.

Flash Drive/Card Tester is more of a tool to check your removable USB flash drives, Compact Flash cards or SD cards etc for read and write errors, but also shows the speed of the drive while it’s being tested. It’s the only tool here that specifically needs installation.

flash drive card tester

The program is able to perform a read test, a destructive write test, or a combined read, write and compare test. As Flash Drive/Card Tester is a testing tool it will keep going until the entire drive has been tested. Therefore, we’d probably recommend stopping after five minutes or so to get a score. The result will show any recoverable or fatal read and write errors along with the final average speed.

Download Flash Drive/Card Tester

8. RMPrepUSBUSB swiss army knife

RMPrepUSB is a tool we have mentioned several times before. It’s like a Swiss army knife for USB drives because it can do so many different things. One of those functions is performing a read and write speed test. Make sure to download the portable version of RMPrepUSB from the long list of downloads.

rmprepusb test speed

Run RMPrepUSB and select the USB drive from the top, then click the Test Speed button in the lower right. The included RMPartUSB.exe is called and runs the test by reading from and writing to a file of around 63MB in size. Because the test file is not that large it might give a slightly higher score than normal on faster USB drives. The results will be saved to a .CSV file where you can keep a record of drives and scores.

Download RMPrepUSB

9. File Read Test – reliable read speed test

This last tool is a little different from the rest because it only tests read speeds. It also needs data to be on the drive already because that’s what gets read back and where the result comes from. File Read Test is a Java based tool which means it’s cross platform but you also need to have Java installed.

To get a consistent sequential read score, copy a large file of at least a few hundred Megabytes to an empty drive. Run the program (right click and select Open with > Java(TM) Platform Binary) and either select a drive or manually select a file on the drive. One issue is the program seems to cache the results so to run the exact same test again you have to eject and reinsert the drive or the read speed will show up as being astronomically high.

Download File Read Test

How to check USB port speed in Windows 10?

  1. Open Device Manager (Press Win + X and select it).
  2. Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers section.
  3. Right-click on a USB Root Hub and select Properties.
  4. In the Advanced tab, you’ll see the Speed listed as USB 2.0 or USB 3.0.

How to test USB speed using CMD?

You can use the Command Prompt (CMD) to check USB speeds by using tools like CrystalDiskMark or other benchmarks that support command-line execution.

After running the tool from CMD, it will display the read/write speeds of your USB device.

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