When you insert a USB Key (pen drive) or a micro SD card in your Windows computer, sometimes the file operations are so slow that you can watch a whole movie and discuss it with your friends and the file operation is still not finished. The sluggishness of the USB drives and SD cards may be due to their excessive usage for a long time and its time that they should be retired from their daily use. But if your brand new USB drive or SD card is working real slow, then it may be due to a setting inside the Windows 7. If you toggle this setting on, then you may experience a performance boost with your memory cards. Here is how you can change this setting :
- First of all you have to insert the USB key, drive or SD card in your computer and wait for Windows to recognize it.
- Press the Windows logo key + R hotkey on your keyboard to bring up the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type devmgmt.msc and press the Enter.
- In the Device Manager, expand the Disk Drives category and you would find your USB keys or drives listed there. Double-click on a removable drive that you have inserted and it would open the Properties window.
- Select the Policies tab in the Properties window. Then select the option labeled Better Performance in the policies settings as shown.
- Then click on the OK button to save the settings. Now your removable USB drives should be running faster.
Turning on this setting for a USB drive enables the write caching feature for that drive which boosts the drive performance many times. But after turning on this policy setting for a removable drive, you should remove it using the Safely Remove Hardware notification area only.