Improve USB Hard Drive Speeds and File Copying
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A community member emailed to tell me he recently bought a PCI 2.0 card. It’s advertised to get speeds of 280 megabits/second. In reality, he’s only getting about 84 megabits/second when transferring files. He knows this isn’t right.
There are a few options here. It’s a possibility that your CPU just isn’t capable of handling higher speeds, although that is doubtful. Definitely check your buffer size. How small or big of a block will determine how fast it will read or write.
A tip from Wirelesspacket is to check and see if your external hard drive has FireWire or eSATA. Either of these options will give you much greater speeds.
You can also right click your “My Computer” icon on your WIndows desktop. Click on the “Manage” option. Under System Tools on the left, click on “Device Manager”. In the right pane, click the + sign next to “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” to expand the menu underneath. Then, you can double click on the HUB. Once there, you can find out how much power is required, and make sure that is how much it is getting.
Finally, SC_Thor suggests using the free program Copy Handler to move files. Copy Handler program is a small tool designed for copy/move files and folders between different storage medias (hard disks, floppy disks, local networks, CD-ROMs and many other). Copy Handler can move files up to 7 times faster than normal Windows copying.
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