[MacNNUK]

Is there such a beast for mac ?

I would like to compare my USB flash drives, with each other, and with commercially quoted figures for others.

Looking for a simple speed test that will give me read and write figures.

I've tried the xbench I already have, freezes on disc test.

I've also tried Disk Activity in Activity Monitor, do these rates relate to commercial figures ?

Copying a 40mb file gives me these write speeds:
Keyboard USB 1gb flash 1.3 mb/s
USB 2 port 1gb flash 7.5 mb/s
copy to imac desktop to desktop 8mb/s
Read speeds ≈ 40% write speed
(Is the read speed the speed into the USB port rather than off the flash drive as it is lower ?)

Do I need another means of benchmarking ?

Ideally an app, plug in USB flash or SD reader, and just gives Write Speed & Read Speed, nothing more, nothing less.

[mduell]

Copying a file is a reasonable benchmark; I'd copy a larger file, perhaps a gigabyte or so. Use the port on the Mac to avoid hubs.

The marketing figures cannot be trusted or compared to.

[cgc]

On my SanDisk Cruzer Micro (8GB "Skin" model), I get 30-34MBps reading and about 10-12MBps writing.

[MacNNUK]

Originally Posted by cgc 

On my SanDisk Cruzer Micro (8GB "Skin" model), I get 30-34MBps reading and about 10-12MBps writing.

Measured how ?

[hookem2oo7]

i like to measure with iStat Menus...provides a nice simple graph with peak transfer rates.

[MacNNUK]

Originally Posted by hookem2oo7 

i like to measure with iStat Menus...provides a nice simple graph with peak transfer rates.

I use the widget version, will try this out.

Unless I'm missing something you cannot get the display to stay on top, so it disappears when you start to copy, and the peak reading is invariable read speed.

[Simon]

If all you guys want is a throughput reading and a graph you already have that built right into OS X.

/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor > Disk Activity