Usb Drive Speed Test Mac Apps

Whenever you buy a new piece of computer hardware, whether it’s a CPU, memory, hard drive etc, one of the factors that will help to determine your purchasing decision would be the performance of the component. With hard drives and SSD drives, you will be looking at capacity and read/write speeds, and it’s a similar story when you purchase a removable memory card or USB flash drive.

Apart from having to worry about USB drives being the full capacity and not being fake if you buy from somewhere like eBay, the performance of a flash drive can vary by massive amounts depending on manufacturer and the type of memory used. If you buy a slow USB flash drive with a high capacity, it could literally take hours to fill it up completely.

Sep 19, 2018 USB 3.1 gen 1 and USB 3.0 have the same speed caps, and we haven’t seen any flash drives that support the faster USB 3.1 gen 2. Connection type: For now, you should stick to a flash drive.

But if you already have some USB flash drives in hand, do you know how fast they actually are at reading and writing? A drive that only writes at 5-6MB/s could take a while to copy large files like movies, whereas a fast USB3 flash drive could do the same copying tasks much faster. Here’s a selection of 8 free tools to benchmark your USB flash drives or media cards to give you an idea of how fast they are.

Usb Drive Speed Test Software

1. USBDeview

USBDeview is a portable utility by Nirsoft that lists or allows you to uninstall current and any previous USB devices attached to your computer. Another feature is the option to benchmark a flash drive and optionally publish the results to the Nirsoft Speed Tests webpage for viewing and comparison. One of the good things about USBDeview is it’s still actively supported and updated.

Find your USB device which should be highlighted in green with a device type of “Mass Storage”, right click on it and select Speed Test (Ctrl+T). Click Start Test and it will sequentially read and write a 100MB file to get the scores. Then you can choose to publish the test results if you wish by clicking the button and ticking the box to agree to publish the results.

Download USBDeview

2. SpeedOut

SpeedOut is a small, simple and portable tool that can quickly measure the sequential read and write speed of your flash drive. The program runs the tests at a low level (needs to be run as admin) which means the scores aren’t affected by the drive file system.

Simply choose your USB drive from the drop down if you have more than one, and SpeedOut will run 4 passes for both reading and writing tests, then display the average for each. The scores can be saved or copied by right clicking on the title bar. SpeedOut is non destructive meaning no files are overwritten and the flash drive doesn’t need formatting to run the test.

Download SpeedOut

3. USB Flash Benchmark

This is a plain and simple speed testing program for USB flash drives which will run a full set of benchmark tests for speeds from 1K chunks up to 16MB, and show the results in a graph. USB Flash Benchmark used to have a companion website to upload results to a database, but that website is no longer available.

Just run the portable program, select your flash drive and press the button. The test will begin with the 16MB test first and continue down to the 1KB test. Be patient as the test does take several minutes to complete. You may as well uncheck the report button as it doesn’t do anything anymore.

Download USB Flash Benchmark

4. CrystalDiskMark

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

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Jon3 years ago

CrystalDiskMark is rubbish for testing the write speed of USB flash drives. It only records the initial write speed (e.g. 28MB/s) which eventually drops to around 17.5-19MB/s. Am I the only one noticing this?

My recently bought Sandisk Ultra 128GB USB3.0 gives a CrystalDiskMark write speed of 28MB/s but this does not represent real world results.

Upon copying 3GB of mp4 files the write speed started off at 28MB/s but eventually dropped to 24MB/s, 20MB/s, 19MB/s, 18MB/s, etc.

The file sizes were 995MB, 748MB, 730MB, and 644MB. The 3119mb of data took 164 seconds to transfer, which equates to an average transfer speed of 19MB/s. For larger transfers (e.g. 5GB+) the speed drops below 18MB/s.!

KING5 months ago

that depend on the random write speed and the cache, you should try change the setting’s for accurate output depend on your daily use.

CrystalDiskMark is widely regarded as one of the best tools around for benchmarking any sort of drive. It depends entirely how you set CrystalDiskMark up. The more passes and bigger test size you give it, the more accurate it will be because it flattens any issues with caching etc.

We recommend a small test size and fewer passes in the article because if you’re testing a slow drive of 3-5MB/s, it could otherwise take hours. For a faster drive you can use maybe 3/5 passes and 100/500MB test size to get a more representative score.

Kasun1 year ago

Should it have the same rate of (Ex: 24MB/s) when we are copying a file to the usb drive? I have copied nearly 6GB but when it copying to the usb, the writing speed boosts up to 25-30 MB/s and getting lower as 100-500Kb/s alternately. The graph is like a wave.

hello thanks

duna singh4 years ago

Can “DiskMark (64bit)” do this job?

Do you mean CrystalDiskMark 64-bit? If so, then yes of course it can.

niepelnosprawny.org4 years ago

how to speed up transfer by program, some software solution

thanks Raymond :D

Mariusz6 years ago

I’ having CrystalDiskMark and it does measure speed of non removable drives only eg SATA

CrystalDiskMark works on just about any removable drive including USB hard drives, USB flash drives and SD memory cards etc. Make sure you plug the drive in before starting the program.

Vincent4 years ago

Usb Drive Speed Test Mac Apps Windows 10

It does not.
I have 2 usb hubs (for sd cards) and both are not recognised by CrystalDiskMark (Version 7.0.3). Tried both the 32 as the 64bit application.
Tried with a sd card in the reader and without.

OOPS. I’m running CrystalDiskInfo and not CrystalDiskMark. Sorry. will try that :)

John Phoenix7 years ago

I don’t want a tool that checks the speed on my USB drive. I need a tool that checks the max transfer speeds of the PORT itself, independently of a USB drive. How can i do this? None of the tools listed above serve this function.

I have never heard of a tool and know of no such way to test the speed of the port itself, you can only test the speed of a device attached to the port, it’s the same for every hardware controller in your computer.

John Lowery6 years ago

There would need to be a “wrap” tool that would plug in to the USB connector. It should be easy to design and would basically reverse the data out and data in wires. Would not need the power wires, since there would be no logic. The test driver would have to handle the data transfer sequencing, since a normal driver would probably puke.

well thats only possible with a oscilloscope, looking at the waveform and how the clockrate is dynamically changed.

Asrock does some motherboards with an optional usb software that is called “xfast usb” it just oveclocks the usb serial bus clock to run data faster, which pushes the error rate up and might corrupt more than help and so on and on…

For your test it is easy and cheaper just to get the outmost fastest usb 3.0 stick possible and then just benchmark usb average transfer speed and use the fastest combiantion as reference sample speed 100%…

it is not important how far a stone can fly if you can’t throw it hard enought to go that fast, realworld vs. laboratory (not scientific usb speed on paper).

Can you please tell us why you would like to know the usb speed itself?

Google: propagation delay, error correction, serial bus, parallel bus and logic analyser, oscilloscope and you get the idear

Marzi10 years ago

Thanks Raymond, you certainly bring in something simple, easy and different always.

Thanks for the information. I’ve been looking for a portable flash drive.

ashwani11 years ago

really nice information, thanks ray

I am using USBDeview long time but did not know about the speed test. Good tip.
Thanks.

norman11 years ago

nice information ray! looks good!

Usb Speed Test Mac

Thanks Ray, Nice Info.

hezron11 years ago

Thanks for sharing raymond, another nice tool.

Many thanks Raymond – another brilliant tool to help us overworked techies !

xdmv11 years ago

Thanks Ray for this info…

Nice information Ray.
I also want to measure my friend’s pendrive speed with this software….

ByteCode11 years ago

Thanks for sharing Mr. Raymond

very nice

Usb Drive Speed Test Mac Apps Free

thanks Ray.. you rock :)

aran11 years ago

thanks ray this is nice.

Thanks for sharing Raymond. I will use it to check the speed of my Flash USB. Thank you! :)

All the data your MacBook uses to operate is stored in a single location: the drive. For many users, this specifically means a hard drive (HDD), which is a physical disk the spins at very high speeds to access chunks of data.

If you’re using a newer Mac, you probably have a solid-state drive (SSD, or flash storage), which is completely electronic with no mechanical parts and thus does not spin.

To check whether your MacBook is with an HDD or SSD, click on the Apple icon on the top left of your screen, select About This Mac, and select Storage.

Hard drive performance is measured in two categories: read speeds and write speeds. The former is a measure of how fast you can open something that already exists, while the latter is how fast you can add something new to your computer’s drive.

Why Should I Test Hard Drive Speed?

Measuring your hard drive speed is one of the easiest and most effective ways to benchmark your MacBook. The data you get by testing will provide a standard to measure customizations such as added extra RAM or drive replacements against, and will also tell you if you need an upgrade in the immediate future.

Knowing your hard drive speed can also help you determine if you’ll be able to run certain programs (such as heavy creative software) effectively or if you don’t have the necessary read and write speeds.

How to Test Hard Drive Speed on a Mac?

To test your HDD, you’re going to need a third-party program, since this functionality isn’t built into macOS. Two of the most popular are BlackMagic and NovaBench, so we’ll show you how to use both.

For context, most modern hard drives have read speeds averaging 120 Mbps and write at 128 Mbps.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

First, you’ll need to download BlackMagic from the Mac App Store (it’s completely free!). Once it is installed, launch the app.

If you only have one hard drive (if you’re not sure, then you probably just have one), all you have to do is hit “START” since the program only has one window.

If you do have more than one drive (such as an external drive), you can navigate to FILE > SELECT TARGET DRIVE to choose which one you would like to test, and how strenuously. You can also CTRL + CLICK or right-click with a mouse to bring up a small menu.

Whichever you choose, your results will be shown on the two large gauges at the top of the window. Since Blackmagic was created for video editors, underneath the main measurements is a series of tables for those creative professionals who need to know what their computer is capable of. If you’re not in that business, however, you can ignore these and focus on your overall speeds instead.

NovaBench

First, download Novabench from the official website or the Mac App Store. The basic version is free, but you can also upgrade to Pro to access more tools if you like the application.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed, open the program and choose “start tests” from the splash screen. There may be a pop up advising you to close other applications, and then NovaBench will proceed with testing.

Once completed, the test results will be saved with the date and time in the application, and you can view them at any time from the NovaBench start screen.

What to Do If My Disk Speed is Slow?

If your hard drive doesn’t seem to be performing up to par, there are a few things you can do to keep your data safe and your MacBook running at its best.

1. Replace the drive

This is the most effective way to get your computer back in order, but it isn’t the best option for everyone. If your MacBook was made after 2013, you probably don’t have this option at all since models made after this point cannot be opened without voiding the warranty. Additionally, the MacBook Air has never been able to be modified.

If you want to replace your drive, you have two options: buy another HDD, or upgrade to an SSD. A new HDD will be cheaper and get you more space for your money but will eventually face the same problems as your current drive. An SSD will offer significantly faster speed and you can consider one of these SSD upgrades for MacBook we listed.

2. Supplement Your Drive

Not sure about replacing the entire drive or physically can’t do it? You can get an external HDD or SSD that plugs in with USB. It will work in tandem with your existing drive and can be a great fall back in case your drive fails or needs a little extra help.

If this sounds like the right solution for you, check out our list of the best external drives for MacBook Pro.

3. Backup Your Data

Since slow read/write speeds could be a sign of the impending death of your hard drive, it’s a good idea to make sure your computer is completely backed up. You’ll need at least as much storage space on the cloud platform (we recommend Google Drive or Dropbox) or an external drive of your choice as you’re currently taking up on your computer.

Then, you can copy your entire library of files, images, videos, and more to this backup location. Many cloud services also offer an automatic backup service, so you never have to worry about accidentally missing your recent files in the event of a hard drive failure. Additionally, getting excess files off your overworked hard drive could help increase its speed.

Final Words

Testing your MacBook hard drive is something everyone should be doing at least occasionally. It provides valuable data for future reference, helps you understand how your computer is functioning and is a good indicator of when it may be time to upgrade a few things.

How has testing your MacBook’s drive speed turned out? Leave us a comment below and tell us what you’ve done with the information you discovered!