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How To Check and Test USB Flash Drive

Posted By Raymond In Category: Computer

Mar
21
2008

One of my friend came up to me yesterday and asked me if I am interested to buy USB flash drives from him. He has about 200 pieces, they are all new and it is 60% cheaper than current market price. It’s a very good deal when you can buy a $100 new USB flash drive for only $40. He couldn’t reveal how or where he got it from and that got me a little worried about the quality of the USB flash drive. He also told me that there won’t be any warranty if the USB flash drive fails. So I thought that the possibilities are it is either stolen or it’s rejected stock from factory.

The only thing I am afraid of is using it for a few times and it couldn’t read the files or can’t detect the drive anymore. So I told him that I’d like to test the USB flash drives first before buying and he agreed. Windows comes with scandisk or chkdsk which I can use to scan for bad sectors but it lacks of burn-in test. So here is what I used to test the current condition and performance of a flash drive.


Check Flash (ChkFlsh) is a very simple flash drive testing and maintaining tool. I use this tool to run a burn in read and write test on the drive. If it is able to survive after a few cycle, the USB flash drive should be OK. There are 3 access types and 5 action types for you to select. Other than checking for drive errors, it can also determine the read and write speed.

Check Flash drive

Check Flash is a free and single portable executable file. It can only test USB flash drive. I tried to use it on external hard drive and I was unable to select the external drive from the drive list. If you know any other free tool that can check and test USB flash drive, please share it with me.

[ Download Check Flash | RapidShare Mirror ]


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    • dipin

      thanx ray. nice tool.

    • Alan

      Hi Raymond

      First time for everything, but this link to Checkflash is not working. Do you have another link please?
      Love your site and the amzing work you do!

      Many thanks

      Alan

    • steve

      yea the link is dead ;_;
      Love the site though :D
      I wait almost every day at my computer for your emails to come!

    • http://www.raymond.cc/ Raymond

      I think many people are hitting on the download link and the official website is down. Please try again later. I think next time I should provide a mirror link.

    • Freekmans

      Hi Raymond !

      I personally use \”h2testw\” to test if I bought a USB Flash disk (or SD card etc) with hacked memory (from eBay).
      I\’m sure you know what hacked memory is: It\’s faking/hacking the USB Flash disk to show more capacity than it really can hold. E.g. a flash disk with a 2GB chip and hack it to 4Gb. But ofcourse after 2GB you get errors and currupted files because the real chip is full.

      H2testw also shows the read and writing speeds and when the usb disk is defective, it also shows which sectors and form how many GB\’s it\’s defective, so that you can resize it to the original size.

      Download (Freeware):
      http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/bo/downloads/h2testw_1.4.zip

      Let me know if this is what you meant !

    • dave

      As others have already said the link to CheckFlash is down so I read with interest the program used by reader Freekmans.
      I have downloaded and tried out his suggested alternative program and found it to be a very useful tool. Thank you Freekmans.

    • webcadre

      interesting tool,

      by the way ray what did happend to the usb that you test?

      did you buy it?

      yeah link is dead…

      thanks!

    • Timo Beil

      There\’s more easy way to do that using the same OS API calls that will be used by any file manager tool should you happen to be needing to copy/write something on your USB drive. To do that you have to the following.
      1. Select Start+R type cmd to start command prompt
      2. In the command prompt window type
      fsutil file createnew X:\\dummy.dmp Y
      where X is the drive letter for your USB stick,
      Y is the number of kilobytes you want to write to your dummy.dmp file. Like if you want the file to be of 1 megabyte size type 1048576 instead of Y here (1 Mbyte=1024*1024=1048576 bytes)
      If utility will fail to write this file, it may indicate you have problems with addressing or microchip on your USB drive.

    • Terence Hill

      Nice tool Raymond.

      Nice to know also the Timo Bell system: the command fsutil has some useful options.

      Clarification: fsutil file createnew X:\dummy.dmp Y
      Y is the size of dummy.dmp in Bytes, not in KiloBytes

    • aslikhar

      my new pen drive kingston 8gig not recognized by my pc(vista os) why?

    • Kn10

      Raymond, could you (or one of the readers) please upload a mirror of this tool? The original site hasnt come back up yet.

    • http://www.raymond.cc/ Raymond

      Added a download mirror.

    • Kn10

      Thanks Raymond. You rock.

    • Brian

      May I know why is my USB flash drive is running so slowly?

    • Egghead

      Thanks, it works.

    • Andy

      Used the above program CHKFLSH and it killed my mp4 player. it was working before i used it, to test the memory.

    • nino7050

      Gracias Raymond
      por compartirlo con los demas mira a ver si te gusta esta otra ramienta se llama Check Drive Capacity

    • Jurga

      Help my what to do if the USB When you save files and keys removed and switched on, the files will already have damaged or to move from one directory to another? Is that a USB can I fix it?

    • ramadhan

      kk minta kash tw cara na menubah size flashdik dari 2 GB menjadi 4GB
      PLEAZE COMMENT NA…..

    • jcl

      I would like to know how can I retrieve my files in my flash drive because I couldn’t browse my files or I couldn’t even view it. Could you please help me. Thank you.

    • si

      RMPrepUSB can do a quick test of USB drives. It only reads/writes blocks at intervals and it is designed to quickly test flash drives for missing memory – e.g. you buy a 32GB USB drive and it turns out to be 4GB – but you have to wait 8 hours for H2testw to test it – RMPrepUSB takes 10 minutes (but does not test every block – use another test for that once it passes RMPrepUSB).
      RMPrepUSb is mainly used for partitioning, formatting and making bootable USB drives. See http://www.boot-land.net or YouTube for more info.

    • mehdi

      thank u very nice

    • Craig

      Hello,

      nino7050 (17) recommends a program called Check Drive Capacity but I have been unable to find this anywhere.

      Does anyone have a link?

      Thanks

    • MSD

      i need this tools
      thks

    • borrel

      @Raymond

      if you cannot find a drive you should try to start the program whith the /all option

      or use danger.bat

      ony it have a bug(edit with notepad)
      —8<–
      @start ChkFlsh.exe /All %1 %2 %3 %4 55 %6 %7 %8 %9
      —8<–
      must be
      —8<–
      @start ChkFlsh.exe /All %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
      —8<–
      WATCH OUT THIS CAN (AND WILL) DESTROY WINDOWS
      (sorry shift ) #############

      and b.t.w.

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