How to Improve USB Transfer Speed on Windows



When your USB transfer speed is very slow in Windows 10/8/7, you may feel very annoyed if you need to transfer large files.

 Then, here comes the question - how to transfer files from a PC to a flash drive faster or from a USB drive to a PC. 

Actually, speeding up USB transfers is easy; just read this post to find out a lot of information.

Slow USB Transfer Speed

USB drives are commonly used on your computer to transfer files like photos, videos, documents, etc. If you transfer large amounts of data, transfer speed is very important.

However, sometimes you may get annoyed that you are getting slow USB transfer speed. No one wants to wait tens of minutes for data transfer, especially when you need data now or have important things.

Why is my USB transfer speed slowing down? you may ask. This is mainly due to some changes to your computer or USB stick, for example, formatting the USB drive, upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and 8, etc.

To transfer files faster between PC and flash drive, you need to speed up USB transfer. How to speed up USB transfer? Get the method from the following section now.


How to Increase Slow USB Transfer Speed

Method 1: Update USB Driver

How to fix slow USB transfer speed through this method? Follow the steps:


Step 1: In Windows 10, press the Win + X keys and select Device settings from the Start menu.


Step 2: Expand Disk drive, right-click on the USB drive and select Update driver.

update USB driver

Step 3: Look for automatically updated driver software.

After that, try the file transfer to check if the issue is resolved.


Method 2: Set the USB Drive to Better Performance

By default, Windows uses the Quick wipe data transfer policy for USB drives. This can disable the write cache on the device, slowing down the transfer speed. However, you can safely disconnect your device without using the notification icon - Securely Erase Hardware.


To speed up USB transfers in Windows 10/8/7, you can disable this feature and set the policy to Better Performance. Follow the steps below:


Step 1: In the Device Settings interface, find your USB drive after expanding Disk drives and right-click to select Properties.


Step 2: Go to the Policies tab, click on Better performance, and enable write caching on the device.


better performance

Note: If you enable this feature and enable write caching, a power outage or device failure may result in data loss or corruption. So you should back up your important files regularly with free backup software, MiniTool ShadowMaker. Also, you must wipe the device in Windows before unplugging it.

Method 3: Change File System

The file system may have an influence on the performance of the USB drive. By default, USB drives are equipped with the FAT32 file system. 

But you can format it to NTFS or exFAT depending on different situations. Usually, NTFS can work faster and more efficiently for file transfer on Windows 10/8/7, and exFAT is better for Mac.

To speed up USB transfers, you need to use the right file system. If you are using a Windows PC, you can convert FAT32 to NTFS. To do this work,

 you can use CMD, Disk Management, or a professional partition manager - MiniTool Partition Wizard. Just click on the given link to find out a lot of information.

Method 4: Upgrade to USB 3.0

If your USB drive uses the 2.0 interface, USB transfer speed slow issues may occur. To speed up USB transfer, you can upgrade USB to 3.0 as this interface can offer 10 times faster than USB 2.0. 

Just use a drive with USB 3.0 for data transfer in Windows 10/8/7.

Method 5: Connect USB Drive to Rear Port (Only for Desktop)

On a desktop, there are multiple ports including a front port and a rear port. Typically, you plug a USB flash drive into one front port when transferring files between your desktop and the drive.

To make USB transfers faster, you can connect a flash drive to a single rear port as it is soldered to the motherboard and runs an Intel chipset, offering faster speeds than the front port. In addition, the rear pole has a more stable power supply.

Last words

Is the USB transfer speed slow in Windows 10/8/7? How to speed up USB transfer? After reading this post, you can easily speed up USB transfers. Just try the above method based on your needs if your USB transfer speed drops.

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