Windows 7 users often face problems when they transfer any file from PC to USB drive. The transfer rate to USB drive is not high enough and satisfactory. However, most of the time I have been asked from the Windows 7 users that “How to optimize file transfer rate between Windows 7 and USB Drive?”. Well, at first you should know the technique of speed up file transfer rate to and from any external drive.
As a Windows expert I am going to explain how the possible optimization procedure work while transferring files from Windows PC to USB pen drive.
Basically, Windows 7 file transfer system always causes problem and most of the time users get sluggish performance. At the time of file transfer sometimes we get fake file transfer speed. The below screenshot will show you about fake file transfer rate in Windows.
The file transfer speed to USB drive greatly depends upon the speed of the individual drive, type of the drive and size of the file to be transferred. The smaller the file size, the slower will be the transfer rate. Mainly, for the NTFS file system the allocation size could be an important issue. The allocation size allows you to increase or decrease the file transfer rate. So, you can change the allocation size of the drive at the time of formatting and measure the difference in transfer rate.
Lack of hard disk memory and high fragmentation are two key factors which can affect file transfer rate. You should notice that the transfer rate at initial condition is high enough and it gradually slower down. If you find these sorts of problems then you should free up some space on your hard drive and defragment hard-drive of PC and flash drive both to get optimized performance at the time of file transfer from your Windows 7 PC to USB Flash drive. Actually, Windows has to give extra efforts to collect the sectors from the fragmented device to put them together.
Some USB keys are not efficient enough due to poor quality and the transfer rate for such external drive can not be improved. There are different tools available in the market to check the performance of external USB drive. I generally use Check Flash to check the performance of any external drive and it shows me the report of any error log so that I can solve the problem to get optimize file transfer speed.
Here is the check flash report for my USB Flash drive.
If you read the article “How to Speed Up USB Data Transfer Rate in Windows 7” then you know that if you choose “Better Performance” option, it optimizes transfer rate somehow. But, I never recommend “Better Performance” option for removable flash drive. There are few reasons.
In “Better Performance” option before writing the data to external disk, the data will be cached. And it is always not possible to safely remove external drive (according to Microsoft policy). It would result a corrupted external USB drive.
As the resource of the USB host controller have to be shared, so try to connect USB drive via such ports that have less device connected to a same controller.
