Tag Archives: how-to

Sav’s guide to USB flash memory & Micro SD card testing

You just bought a new USB flash drive or Micro SD card, nice! But is it fake? Does it meet the advertised capacity and speeds? These things should be tested right away, giving you enough time to go back to where you bought it from if needed.

One of the most important things is how fast is the read and write speed of the port you’re using to test the drive. If you’re testing out an SD card, make sure the reader/writer is capable of going beyond the speeds the card is capable of.

If you’re unsure, just be aware that if your tests reach this number constantly then maybe it is your port and not the SD card. Assuming you’re not sure of the capable maximum speed, lets start off with:

CrystalDiskMark

Most cases drives come already formatted, so before making any changes, doing a quick test with CrystalDiskMark allows you to assess if your port that you’ve connected to is holding you back. Use another drive to compare it to.

I recommend making a folder on your desktop, with the folders nicely named of each drive you’re testing.

If you do not have a spare drive or SD card to compare to, then just be aware that if you just purchased a drive that claims to read and write 100MB/s and you’re only getting 30MB/s well that may be the maximum the port can go. You may need to try another device as an alternative method. This doesn’t mean it can’t possibly be that bad. It actually can, but this is all about getting a baseline for your tests.

Disk Management

See what you’re dealing with. Press Start (Windows 10) and run “diskmgmt.msc”, this will open up Disk Management and will show you what the partitions look like on the drive. If there’s two partitions, with one being very small I wouldn’t touch it for now, but simply make a mental note. You’ll start to get a better understanding of the drive as you go.

H2testw

Once you’ve done a baseline and checked the size, the main thing to do is a data integrity test. This will save you the bother of continuing if the size (capacity) is false. It will also give you a average read and write speed, but this test is the longest.

If H2testw managed to successfully write every byte on the disk without issue then the capacity is real. It should have also given you a average write & verify (read) speed result while it was doing the test. Take screenshots and move onto the next steps.

SD Card Formatter

If you’re using an SD card, it’s definitely worth formatting using the SD Card Formatter tool from SD Association website. If the drive needs a format, this is reliable way to do it. I also like to run diskpart and clean the drive before doing a format.

diskpart

Press Start (Windows 10) and type cmd which should result to Command Prompt. Right click and run as an administrator. Step 1) Type “diskpart” in the terminal and it should run. I’ll be basic with the instructions on this, but I recommend looking at a few YouTube videos of this command line tool if this is the first time you’re using it. Any wrong move and you might format important drives.

Step 2) list disk

You’ll get a nice list of all the disks connected to the system. Look for the one that is your drive you’re dealing with. Usually you can tell as it’s the last connected drive and matches the capacity.

Step 3) “select disk x” (where x is your USB key)

Step 4) “clean”

HD Tune Pro

This program basically does what CrystalDiskMark does but gives some more information. I like to do a read/write tests without the drive being mounted (first tab). Take screenshots of both the read and write test.

Format the drive using SD Card Formatter / diskpart / Disk Management console.

If you’re formatting an SD card; use SD Card Formatter above. If it’s a normal disk or USB drive, you can use Disk Management to create preferred partitions or use diskpart again, repeat the steps above, but continue below.

Step 5) “create part primary”

Step 6) “select part 1”

step 7) “active”

Miscellaneous

Storage manufactures are basically falsely advertising by using a different form of measurement of bytes thus resulting in different outcome for what is the true capacity of the drive. To be as simple as possible. 1 GB to them is 0.9313 GB.

So an advertised 1TB would be 931.32GB on your computer as available storage. If you’re getting even less than this then the capacity is basically missing.

Here’s some useful information:

Why a hard drive has less storage space than promised?
https://www.tweakandtrick.com/2013/07/lost-storage-space.html

Convert byte to gigabyte – Conversion of Measurement Units
https://www.convertunits.com/from/byte/to/gigabyte

SSD is 256 gb but only showing 238 gb? | Tom’s Hardware Forum
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/ssd-is-256-gb-but-only-showing-238-gb.1998324/

Summary

Using various software and tools mentioned above you can collect enough results to determine the true capacity and speed. There are more tools. There is more things to know, but for now this is it.

How to download the latest Windows 11 (any version) directly from Microsoft

It’s always best to make sure you’re downloading a legit and untampered version of your operating system you want to use. Here’s a simple three step guide to download a copy of Windows 11 directly from the Microsoft website.

Step 1) Go to: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11

Step 2) Scroll down till you Download Windows 11 Disk Image (ISO), select your language, it should then simply generate you a download link that lasts for 24 hours.

Now, you could just load that onto a USB and be on your way (using rufus to create a bootable USB drive), but maybe you want to actually verify what you’ve downloaded? Here’s how:

Download IgorWare Hasher, which basically verifies the files SHA-1, MD5 and CRC32 hashes. Using that you compare it to a known list of verified ISO’s. This time Microsoft provides these hashes right after selecting your preferred language.

Oh and for your information, “English International” is the British English version, supposedly.

Edit, extract, create, merge Matroska files

So you have a .mkv file and want to maybe remove or add subtitles to your video. Back in the way you were out of luck and if you did not have the original files to re-encode again, however now with Matroska it’s a lot simpler. It’s essentially a container.

Using MKVToolNix you can simply open the container, add or remove what you like and then reproduce the container again. No need for codecs, or long rendering times. It’s GUI (graphical utility interface) based, but there are purely command-line methods as well, but I found MKVToolNix to be very simple and gets the job done.

You can download it here. https://mkvtoolnix.download/

Simply scroll down to your preferred operating system (Windows is down below).

How to create a bootable USB drive with Rufus (2021)

I previously wrote a guide to download Windows 10 directly from Microsoft and also check the hashes to confirm they are original/legit copies of Windows. With Rufus you are able to do pretty much the same step, but quicker so I’ve always been thinking of writing it up. Having issues with legacy and UEFI systems not reading the bootable USB drive, I thought I can combine the two.

There are other guides out there so I think I do not need to go into deep detail, you can always go check them out if you get stuck (links down below), however I simply wanted to point out the key things that may cause issues.

Once you start Rufus rather than selecting an ISO file (windows you’ve already got downloaded) instead use the drop down menu and click “DOWNLOAD” then literally click the “DOWNLOAD” button again so it pops up the menu to download your preferred version. Do this with the latest version of Rufus or make sure to update Rufus using the cog settings at the very bottom of the program.

After that I prefer to download via the link and save the ISO for another time. I then repeat usual process of selecting an ISO and the important parts here are now loading up the Partition scheme as “MBR” pressing ALT+E to ensure the target system is BIOS or UEFI.

I have seen people select the file system as FAT32, but if you do that with the latest windows with file sizes larger than 4gb you will have issues, because I can confirm for example in Windows 11 and also Windows 10 21H1 you will have files larger than 4 GB’s within the installation so stick to NTFS.

Other guides

https://rufus.ie/en/
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-bootable-media-uefi-support

Update 2021/11/21: Typo corrected.

Extracting audio from a video file (mpg/mpeg)

So you have a video file, such as an mpg/mpeg file. You would like to extract the audio from it without making any changes. Video containers usually hold the video and audio file separately so lossless conversion is possible.

Depending on your video container format, the method would be different, but for mpg/mpeg you can simply download ffmpeg (BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds) and extract it to your C drive (or your preferred location), name the folder ffmpeg and start Command Prompt (see below)

Type “cmd” after pressing the Windows start menu.

Once you launch Command Prompt, you will need to head to the folder that you created and extracted the downloaded files. Type “cd C:\ffmpeg”. For convenience, move your video file to the same folder and execute the command below.

ffmpeg -i "1.mpeg" -vn -acodec copy "1.wav“

What you’re telling ffmpeg to do is look for the file “1.mpeg” within the folder (rename this to your file name), then extract the audio, creating the file “1.wav” (or you could change it to “1.mp3”). Once done you should see the newly created file in the same folder.

All done!

For more advanced people, if you know what you’re doing you can do this without moving any files around.

Links

https://streamshark.io/blog/understanding-codecs-and-formats/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats

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