How To Improve USB Pen Drive Data Transfer Speed In Windows

Nowadays, USB drive has definitely become one of the major medium through which data is transferred to and from the computers. But, you might have notice that sometimes you feel like data transfer speed should be more. Although, it depends upon the type of USB drive that is being used and its performance, but still there are many ways by which one can surely improve the performance of the USB drive. One of such solutions has been recently introduced by Microsoft which has been specially designed and developed for the Windows 7 operating system.


Recently, Microsoft has released a hotfix for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 which as said, has been specially designed to scale up the performance and speed of the USB storage devices which may be in the form of Flash drives and USB hard disks. The hotfix which has been introduced by Microsoft is basically known as hotfix KB2581464 and it introduces a new feature in the above mentioned operating systems and it enables the user to increase the maximum transfer size of USB storage devices which is normally 64 kilobytes (KB) to a huge size in terms of transfer size, like 2 megabytes (MB). But, according to Microsoft, this can improve the performance and speed for some USB storage devices only and not for every kind of drive.
But, the one thing which must be noted here is that this new update will not be served by Microsoft through its normal Windows automatic update service, and it is only available for download from Microsoft Support website. After downloading and installing it, one may feel the difference in the speed and performance of the USB drives. If you want to download it, then you may do so from the available download link at the end of this article. Once you install this update in your computers, you will observe that it increases the maximum transfer size of USB storage devices, and for that simply follow some steps like:

1. First of all, you have to click Start icon and then simply type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press Enter. We all know that it will give you the complete list for all the registry entries in your system.
2. Among the large number of registry entries available in the list you have to locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\VVVVPPPP

Here, don’t get confuse with VVVV, as it simply represents device descriptor idVendor in hexadecimal.
Similarly, PPPP represents device descriptor idProduct in hexadecimal.

1. After this, simply click on the Edit option, and from this simply point to New, and then click DWORDValue.
2. After clicking on it, it will ask you to type MaximumTransferLength, and after giving it simply press Enter.
3. Then again click Edit, and then click Modify.
4. You will see a Value data box, in which you have to type a value to specify the maximum transfer size between 64KB and 2MB. For example, you select Decimal and type a value between 65535 (64K) and 2097120 (2M).
5. After this complete procedure, simply exit the Registry Editor.

So, if you are feeling any issue with the performance of the USB storage drives, then only you are advised to apply this hotfix otherwise there is no need for it as it requires changes in registry entries which can be a little complex for a common user.
Download Hotfix