Here’s a quick trick to boost the performance of your USB drive/stick which I came across while I was doing partitioning using Windows’ built in disk management tool (click on the thumbnail images to view the full sized screenshot):
- Get to ‘My Computer’, right click on your USB device and click ‘Properties’.
- In the dialog box that appears, click on the ‘Hardware’ tab, select your USB device and click ‘Properties’.
- In the dialog box that appears, click on the ‘Policies’ tab, select ‘Optimize for performance’, and click the ‘OK’ button of the dialog boxes that have shown up.
The performance increase is very apparent if you’re using an external hard drive which is connected via USB (my 200GB external hard disk is still running fine :P) and probably even with USB flash drives if you’re doing a lot of data transfers.
The downside in changing this setting is that you would have to ensure that you have to explicitly invoke the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ option (the green icon in the system tray) before unplugging your USB device as opposed to being able to just unplug it and most likely not suffer any data corruption.