Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Windows 7 fix for slow copy speeds from USB

I was recently copying over about 1.5 GB of data from my USB stick to Windows 7 (32bit) and was surprised to see that it took over 25 minutes to do the copy. I researched a little bit and this is what helped me fix it.

1) Run these commands to turn off TCP autotuning. (http://www.speedguide.net/articles/windows-7-vista-2008-tweaks-2574)

netsh int tcp set heuristics disabled
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled


Effect: good increase in speed

2) Turn off Quick Heal antivirus during copy
Effect: good increase in speed

3) In Device Manager, right-click the USB drive in Disk drives folder, then select Properties, switch to Policies tab, and choose "Better Performance". Click OK to keep it. (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistahardware/thread/60a7b507-9bda-4e66-8693-b85498cd860c/)
Effect: good increase in speed

Overall the copy time came down to about about 4 minutes (From stable speed of 500KB/s prior to changes, to 5.4 MB/s)

Note for the smart asses: before one starts inferring more than is necessary, let me clarify that Win7 and Quick Heal are both great products and serve my purpose very well.