External drive very slow copying data to D: Solved/Closed

Question

Hello,
My external drive is extremely slow copying music and data to my D: drive, the format of both the drives is ntfs, and my anti virus is not scanning, when I drag and drop from one to the other the copying is extremely slow.
Please not too technical thanksSystem Configuration: Windows XP Internet Explorer 8.0

Freshtex! · Accepted Answer

Howto: Fix Slow USB 2.0 file transfer on Windows

USB storage devices can be optimized for either quick removal or performance.  If optimized for quick removal, data transfer can potentially be reduced to a crawl. 

To optimize your USB drive for performance: 

1.Right click on the USB drive and select properties
2.Select the Hardware tab
3.Under All Disk Drives, highlight your USB drive and select Properties
4.Select the Policies tab and select Optimize for performance.
5.Press OK twice, and your transfer speeds should increase dramatically
Note that when your drive is optimized for performance you'll need to use the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the taskbar to eject the drive - otherwise you'll risk corrupting your data by just removing the drive from the port.

p.p.panik · Answer

I also had problems with copying speed from an external USB drive to my internal one. But the problem only appeard for my movie folder on that disk, which seemed a bit odd to me and found a bit weird soloution to it:
I checked the information for the movie folder (apple+i) and compared them to the ones of a 'no problem' folder. For some reason the 'sharing & permission' section of my movie folder had two entries for me on saying 'read & write' and the other saying 'custom' above it.
I changed 'custom' to 'read & write' and everything went back to normal.

I now have reading and writing speed of 20 MB/sec. Before had 500kb/sec.
Don't now if this works for you, but it might be worth checking.

Wizz · Answer

Go to device manager & try optimizing the drive for performance. 

Goto: Device manager/Disk Drives  
Find the disk and right click for properties option. 
Click 'Policies' tab' 
Check "Better Performance" 

That should solve the problem.

Melchior · Answer

This may or may not address your problem.  I just upgraded from XP to a new PC running Vista.  MY external USB 2.0 hard drive used to work quickly 
(30 MB/sec), but now was running extremely slowly (1.5 MB/s, if I'm lucky).  

Vista would tell me that my device could perform faster if I connected it to a USB 2.0 port.  Well guess what?  All my computer has are USB 2.0 ports.  Other ports were no help.

I tried all sorts of fixes, nothing was working.  The hard drive would still work fast on my old PC.

One forum suggested that some USB cables don't fully support USB 2.0.

So I tried a different USB cable, and it works perfectly.  25.6 MB/s!  Put the old cable on, and it was slow again, with the same error message.  Put the new cable on, and it worked fast again.

So consider trying a new cable!

gazzler · Answer

tried loads of things even microsoft recommended settings. found this great......its bloody works, thanks to the super brain who worked it out
Go to
1. Control panel
2. System and Maintenance
3. Administrative tools
4. Run services shortcut
Once the services program loads find the services called Background intelligent transfer service and stop it
also right click on the same service and click properties then change the start value to manual or disabled this should also fix the network problem and USB copy and paste problem
.
Amazing problem solved

Eventor · Answer

I Dont Know If You Solved This Problem, But The Way To Fix It Is Change The Cluster Size To 512 Bytes, The Problem Is The Hard Drive Is Reaching Its Lifetime.

External drive very slow copying data to D:

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