Extremely slow USB transfer speed

Solution 1:

In Device Manager, right-click the USB drive in the Disk drives category, then select Properties, switch to Policies tab, and choose "Optimize for performance". Click OK to keep it.

Note: If you use this method, make sure you use the "Safely remove hardware" icon that appears in the notification area when you plug in the device (the notification area is the little area near the clock on the taskbar).

Solution 2:

Check your BIOS settings! Typically, you access your BIOS settings shortly after you turn on your PC by pressing the DEL key. Sometimes, this is the F2 key (like for most Dell's) or possibly something else.

Once in the BIOS, you may have a setting related to USB compatibility and it could be that it's now set to "Legacy" mode which maxes out at something like 12Mbps. This legacy mode may be necessary for some older USB devices (like certain modems that no one uses any more), but if you have no such devices then leaving it set to legacy mode makes no sense. Even if you have older USB devices, it's not likely that you need rock hard USB 1.x compatibility at the BIOS level. Therefore, you probably will want to change your BIOS settings with regard to USB compatibility and set it to the other setting, probably something like "full mode" so that your USB controller(s) can transfer data at rates up to 480Mbps. Not that Windows Vista/7 will exactly let you go that fast, but it will definitely be better than 1 to 2MBps.

Solution 3:

A lot of USB pen drives just have slow write speeds. It's a hardware limitation of the flash memory they're using and there is really nothing you can do about it.

All the suggestions like write caching or different formatting typically will only give marginal gains in cases like this - where the (external) device's internal speed is simply low compared to the computer's HDD speed and even low compared to the interface speed (USB2 or USB3).

Write caching can give some gain when you're transferring lots of small files, but even then it's only marginal if the rest of the system is orders of magnitude faster than the device itself. Write caching might appear to give a good speed boost for modest sized transfers, but if you want to eject the drive immediately upon transfer complete then you'll usually get a noticeable delay before you get the go ahead to remove it (as the cache is still being written). So ultimately the gain is typically minimal.

I've got a few slow USB pen drives that I use for recorded TV/movies, and none of the suggestions make any significant difference for copying large file sizes (typ several GB). The simple fact is that write speed around 3 to 6 MB/s (for large file sizes) is not uncommon for cheap USB pen drives.

BTW. The op's transfer speed at 2.55 GB in 5 to 6 minutes is actually around 8 MB/sec rather than the stated 1.5 to 2.5 MB.sec.