Does Format Type Matter for Speed Tests?

  • Be sure to checkout “Tips & Tricks”
    Dear Guest Visitor → Once you register and log-in please checkout the “Tips & Tricks” page for some very handy tips!

    /Steve.
  • BootAble – FreeDOS boot testing freeware

    To obtain direct, low-level access to a system's mass storage drives, SpinRite runs under a GRC-customized version of FreeDOS which has been modified to add compatibility with all file systems. In order to run SpinRite it must first be possible to boot FreeDOS.

    GRC's “BootAble” freeware allows anyone to easily create BIOS-bootable media in order to workout and confirm the details of getting a machine to boot FreeDOS through a BIOS. Once the means of doing that has been determined, the media created by SpinRite can be booted and run in the same way.

    The participants here, who have taken the time to share their knowledge and experience, their successes and some frustrations with booting their computers into FreeDOS, have created a valuable knowledgebase which will benefit everyone who follows.

    You may click on the image to the right to obtain your own copy of BootAble. Then use the knowledge and experience documented here to boot your computer(s) into FreeDOS. And please do not hesitate to ask questions – nowhere else can better answers be found.

    (You may permanently close this reminder with the 'X' in the upper right.)

ronzastovnik

New member
Jan 21, 2025
1
0
Does it matter what the drive's format is? eg: exFAT, NTFS, FAT32?

I got a new 64 GB PNY USB 3.0 drive from Amazon. It was formatted FAT32. Validrive started its calibration and check really fast on read and writes and then slowed down to a crawl. I didn't save the results. Then I formatted the drive with exFAT and ValiDrive Calibration took a long time. and the test started really slow and continued slow.
Code:
                 read                write
  samples             1,152             1,152
  minimum               981             2,425
  maximum             9,170         4,413,135
  average             1,855           590,976

So it seems like format type might matter.

Also wondering what other external conditions that might affect ValiDrive's speed. eg: computer available memory and other tasks running on the computer, so I tested it on a new, freshly booted, fast computer and calibration took over 90 seconds and the test was extremely slow. Results from that test
Code:
                 read                write 
  samples             1,152             1,152
  minimum             1,655             3,214
  maximum             4,647         5,087,346
  average             2,812           812,334

Both computes have USB 3.0 ports. The USB drive did test all samples green and showed the drive at full capacity.

Just for reference, tests I've done on a exFAT SanDisk USB 3.0 64GB drive tested blazing fast from start to finish.
Code:
                 read                write
  samples             1,152             1,152
  minimum             1,113             2,698
  maximum            11,035            32,025
  average             1,769             3,965

I'm wondering if I should send my new PNY drives back to Amazon.

I suppose I could run a bunch more tests and get better understanding, but I bet someone already knows.

Thanks.
-Ron
 
I have found:
ValiDrive appears to be agnostic regarding OS and formatting on any drive.
ValiDrive tests 'physical' sectors, not Operating System clusters.
I use ValiDrive on good old-fashioned USB HDD hard disk drives <-- really fast compared to thumb drives.
ValiDrive is like a mini-SpinRite Level 5, and free.
ValiDrive is NOT a speed test, and does not access a drive the way Windows does.
'Speed' of a ValiDrive test completion depends on a drive's ability to switch between read and write, one sector or one group of sectors at a time, which is not typical behavior, and bypasses Windows drivers and cache.
Validrive's behavior is not a meaningful representation of how a drive behaves in other environments.
Different drives behave differently in the same USB port and in different USB ports and in different computers - I think 'compatibility' is a best-guess on all chipmaker's parts - plus driver and other variables, make it a crap-shoot to try to get consistent accurate and appropriate performance measurements.
That being said, I mark a drive with the ValiDrive total time so I can then compare when using the drives in Windows - there is a general relatedness in potential performance.
But many tasks I do don't really care about speed if I'm just copying one file and unplugging.
So I am not unhappy about slow drives.
This tells me that cheap drives may run slow, but that's why they are cheap, even though they may claim the same USB3 specifications as expensive drives.
Also, expensive drives may be cheap drives with a high price tag, so price is not indicative of performance, we have to test every drive.
There are many speed tests, the quickest I've found is free inside Nirsoft USBDeview.
More importantly to me, ValiDrive seems to 'wake up' old flash drives, making them responsive again, when before running ValiDrive on them, they crawled.
ValiDrive is a terrific tool to play with, see one of my ValiDrive experiments:
- yeah, TWO competing ValiDrive tests running on the same drive at the same time - and NO crashes, amazing.
Kudos to Steve Gibson, savvy programmer extraordinaire.
.