I am using Windows 8 64-bit and I have several USB thumbdrives. Whenever I try to copy files to any of them, the transfer starts out at about 17 MB/s, then goes to 19 MB/s, then drops to 5 MB/s and bounces between there and 3 MB/s. I have just updated my drivers and my computer has fairly new and fast hardware. These speeds are intolerable and I was wondering how to fix it.
I downloaded TeraCopy which has a precise percent progress bar, and I noticed that the transfer will start and stop, stuttering. About 7 MB will get transferred, then it will stop for about 2 seconds, and resume for 7 MB, and stop, until it's finished.
It should be noted that the rest of my computer is not slow at all, just copying to a USB drive takes an inordinate amount of time. I have looked at many of the related questions and cannot find any help.
I have tried using Device Manager to "Optimize the drives for performance" but that helped absolutely none. Some drives have a FAT32 filesystem, some have an NTFS filesystem, so I don't think that matters.
It seems like transferring to a USB stick used to be faster on my computer. Any ideas what it could be?
Best Answer
50% of common USB flash drives erase at 7MB/s or less. You probably just have cheap drives. They may have been faster in the past because until you write to each block at least once, erases aren't needed. After that, an erase is needed on every write.
See this table of performance numbers and look up your drive.