Check Flash - Free report on Your Flash Drive's Performance

Mihail, a Russian software hobbyist, has written a nice USB drive benchmarking program called Check Flash and released it to the world. Available at his site for a quick free download you can pick this up to test the speed of your current flash drives and try out some new ones. Although not likely to be as accurate as favorites like HDTach or Sandra, the price is definitely right. We gave it a try on a few of the drives we had laying around and its results were in line with my more intensive tests. The most refreshing part of this little package (besides the price tag) is that it doesn't require that the drive be blank before running the test. In deference to the fact that some of the tests do blank the drive during tests, the owner has locked the default options to limit it to running on anything, but removable drives. The author has very thoughtfully included the ability to pass command line switches to the program to open up its functions and allow batch processing.

Check Flash isn't perfect, and don't expect it to be completely bug-free, but it should do a good job of giving you an approximation of your drive's speed. You'll be wanting something to assure you that the drive or photo memory card you just shelled out your hard earned cash for was worth the money. Many manufacturers have stopped reporting speeds due to quality control dropping allowing too much variety into the market. Variety that they don't care to be called to the mat to warranty.