Capacity Test For USB Flash Drive Memory

It’s always a good idea to verify that a USB flash drive works and has its rated capacity, even when you buy them from a reputable vendor.

The easiest way to measure their capacity (quite different than measuring battery capacity):

• Create a monster file of random data
• Copy it to the drive
• Verify that the copy matches the original
• Delete the copy

That doesn’t verify that you can successfully create a bazillion little files, but it’s a good rough-and-ready check that you haven’t gotten, say, a 2 GB drive mis-labeled as 4 GB. It could happen…

Assuming you’ve deleted any shovelware (these were clean) and that the drives are now empty (as these were), find out how big they claim to be:

df /media/ed/CENTON\ USB/
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1        4107284     4   4107280   1% /media/ed/CENTON USB

Pour /dev/urandom into a file that will fill the available space (not the total space), which will take several minutes:

time dd bs=1K count=4107280 if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/test.dat
4107280+0 records in
4107280+0 records out
4205854720 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 450.883 s, 9.3 MB/s

real	7m31.162s
user	0m0.712s
sys	6m54.166s

Copy it to the drive, using rsync with a progress indicator:

time rsync --progress /tmp/test.dat /media/ed/CENTON\ USB/
test.dat
  4205854720 100%    8.45MB/s    0:07:54 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)

sent 4206368202 bytes  received 31 bytes  8772405.07 bytes/sec
total size is 4205854720  speedup is 1.00

real	7m59.035s
user	0m24.490s
sys	0m17.433s

Verify that the two files match:

time diff /tmp/test.dat /media/ed/CENTON\ USB
real	3m32.576s
user	0m0.588s
sys	0m6.268s

Then delete the file:

rm /media/ed/CENTON\ USB/test.dat

Repeat as needed for the other flash drives, using the same test.dat file. All these drives worked; one subsequently caught a disease at the library.

And, yes, one of them is noticeably darker; four of the others seem lighter and five darker gray. Most likely, the cases came from three different anodizing batches and, I suppose, if I were to pry them apart, the innards could be radically different. Ya never know!