Hey, I got a bag of like 30 4GB flash drives my dad got from work i'm just wondering if you know of any good tools out there that will help me show the true read/write speeds of these drives or if you have any recommendations?
Thanks.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/filereadtest/index.php?title=Main_Page#Quick_Disk_Test_tool
http://usbmst.sourceforge.net/
if you have a copy of spinrite and do not mind doing about 16GB worth of writes to them, then you can run spinrite on them at level 4.
For me, this has fixed a few flash drives (allows the controller better detect its own bad flash cells and swap them), and if the data is still not stored reliably, it will report the issue and you will know to not use that drive.
Better to it is better to do a test which writes about 4 times the drives capacity, than to risk saving important data to it and have it come back corrupted. A single 100% fill is not enough to fully test the flash as flash drives always have more capacity than you have direct access to, as part of wear leveling, so it is entirely possible for a single 100% fill to come out good 1 time, and the same test come out corrupted the next.
Cool. Cheers for the comments. I was just wondering if it's possible to RAID a good amount of these. I've heard of people building their own enclosure filled with USB flash drives and making a RAID out of them with Linux. Don't think it's possible to even do that with windows though.