Flash Memory Toolkit offers diagnostics, repair tools for USB drives

As a result, I've started keeping tabs on utilities designed specifically for USB flash drives. One utility I discovered recently is EFD Software's Flash Memory Toolkit, which runs on all 32-bit versions of Windows (including Vista). Since it needs to be installed to run, it's not a stand-alone program and can't be run as-is from a USB drive, but it's very small and installs with virtually no system overhead.

The kit includes these six tools:

• Error Scan performs multi-pass read/write tests on flash drives, and produces an average read speed from the test results.
• Erase performs either quick or full erasure of data from the device.
• File recovery scans for files previously deleted from the device and attempts to recover them. The recovery process supports many common document types, including Word documents, .ZIP archives and .JPG images.
• Backup/restore backs up and restores the contents of the drive to an .FMT (proprietary image file format) file.
• Low-level benchmark conducts low-level read/write tests to gauge the speed of the drive. This can be useful if you want to sample multiple drives and compare their statistics side by side, to see which is the fastest (for instance, if you're considering using one for accelerating Vista via ReadyBoost).
• File benchmark conducts file-level read / write tests to gauge the speed of the drive.

The Flash Memory Toolkit normally costs $39.95 per instance, but the free version of the program can still be used as-is with some of its functions disabled. For instance, most of the test tools, for instance, will work in read-only mode and will not conduct write tests. The file benchmark test, however, runs in both read and write modes in the demo version.

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Insight, (formerly the Windows Power Users Newsletter), a blog site devoted to hints, tips, tricks and news for users and administrators of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista. He has more than 12 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.

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