TRANSFER FILES FASTER AND BACK THEM UP
Copy files faster to your USB stick
With USB sticks now offering huge storage capacities, you don’t usually have to worry about the size and number of files you copy to them, but you may have to wait a while for large transfers, such as highresolution photos and videos, to complete. If files are taking an inordinate length of time to copy over, there are a few tricks you can try to speed things up.
First, try inserting your USB stick in a different port, in case the current one is damaged and slowing your transfers. If that doesn’t help, ensure that the drivers for your USB stick are up to date. To do this, open Device Manager by typing device manager into the Windows search box and clicking the ‘Best match’. Expand the ‘Disk drives’ category, right-click your USB stick and choose ‘ Update driver’ (see screenshot above right), then click ‘Search automatically for drivers’.
If Windows says the best drivers are already installed, try reinstalling them. Choose ‘ Uninstall device’ in the right-click menu, unplug your USB stick from your PC and restart your machine. Plug the stick back in and Windows will automatically find and install the latest drivers. Next, try increasing your USB stick’s maximum data-transfer rate. Right-click the Start button in Windows 10 or 11, or press Windows key+X, and select Disk Management.
In the Volume column of the Disk Management window, right-click your USB stick and choose Properties. Click the Hardware tab, select the name of the drive there and click Properties again. On the Policies tab ( 1 in our screenshot top right), select ‘ Better performance’ 2 and tick the ‘Enable write caching on the device’ option 3 . Click OK twice to confirm and exit.
With ‘Better performance’ enabled, you should ensure you always safely remove your USB stick from your PC. To do this, right-click its taskbar icon and choose ‘Eject…’, rather than just unplug it, or you risk losing or corrupting data.
Test the speed of your USB sticks
If you want to copy a large number of files (or a small number of large files such as videos) to a USB stick in one go, it makes sense to use the fastest device in your arsenal. Speeds vary considerably between USB sticks and depend on factors including their age, capacity, how many times they have been formatted, and the USB technology they use. The latest standard, USB 3.2, theoretically offers data-transfer rates of up to 20Gbps, but in practice, you’re unlikely to achieve anywhere near that.
To run a benchmark test over your USB sticks, download the free CrystalDiskMark ( www.crystalmark.info) program, click the green Download button and choose the free Installer version. Insert a USB stick, launch the program, and select the drive in the dropdown menu. Click the green ‘All’ button to run the device through four thorough tests to ascertain how quickly it can read and write sequential and random data.
Alternatively, to save time, just click the SEQ1M Q1T1 test (see screenshot below), which provides results most similar to real-world use and takes around a minute to run.
Note down the read and write speeds detected by CrystalDiskMark, or click the File menu to save the results as a text or image file. Insert another USB stick and run the test(s) again to see if the new device’s data-transfer rates are faster or slower than the previous device.
Download files directly to your stick
Rather than downloading videos, MP3s, documents, and other files to your hard drive and then copying them to a USB stick, you can download them directly to a portable drive.
The easiest way to do this is to set your browser to ask you where to save files, so you can choose your USB stick as the download destination. In Chrome, Brave and Edge, go to Settings then Downloads, and select ‘Ask where to save each file before downloading’ (see screenshot below)—or ‘Ask me what to do with each download’ in Edge. In Firefox, choose ‘Always ask you where to save files’ on the General tab in Settings.
Alternatively, you can set your USB stick as your default download folder, so that files are saved to it automatically, provided it’s plugged in. Click the Change button next to the current folder location in the Downloads section—or Browse in Firefox—and select your USB drive. This setting will also be used by extensions you use to save content from the web, such as YouTube video downloaders.