Increase USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Speed/Performance for Free [5 Ways]

How to speed up a USB 3.0 external hard drive

This page mainly tells solutions about how to speed up and increase a USB 3.0 external hard drive for data transferring or file copying in Windows 10, 8 or 7, etc. operating systems. If you are having one of the problems listed below, you’ll need to find a way to improve the performance and speed up your external hard drive:

1. 1. USB 3.0 transfer speed slow
2. 2. External hard drive transfer speed slow
3. 3. File copying slow on USB 3.0 flash drive or external hard drive
4. 4. The computer gets stuck while copying or transferring files to USB 3.0
5. 5. PC freeze on copying files from USB 3.0
6. ...

So how to increase and optimize the USB 3.0 hard drive performance on different Windows systems? Here we've collected the best five free methods for fixing this issue, and you can apply any one of them for a try:

Tip: Copy and extract important data the external hard drive first

You can either choose to copy and paste existing files from your slow external hard drive to a new device at a very slow speed or prefer a more efficient and fast alternative tool to free backup and extract all your files from external hard drive to a new device at one time at high speed. 
If you choose the latter option, you may turn to EaseUS Todo Backup Free for help. It’s 100% free and risk-free to back up and extract files from your external hard drive with a small space occupation on your target device. 

After this, let’s see how to increase your USB 3.0 external hard drive speed with a free and straightforward method now: 

Way 1. Optimize USB 3.0 external hard drive with better performance

When the storage devices get slow, one quick way to improve the device’s performance is to change the device hardware settings:

Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to your PC.
Step 2. Open Windows File Explorer, locate and right-click on your external hard drive, choose Properties.
Step 3. On the Hardware tab, click Properties, choose Change Settings on the General tab.
Step 4. Click Policies tab and choose Better performance, click OK to confirm all the changes.

After this, remember to unplug your external hard drive: right-click on the tray icon and choose Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device.

Way 2. Format USB 3.0 external hard drive

Another efficient way to quickly fix the slow external hard drive issue on Windows PC is to format the USB 3.0 external hard drive to NTFS. 
But do remember to follow the above provided above to extract or backup files on the drive to a secure location in advance.

Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your PC.
Step 2. Open Windows File Explorer, locate and right-click on the external hard drive, choose Format.
Step 3. Set the file system to NTFS and confirm that you want to format the drive. 
Step 4. Click Start, wait and click OK to complete the process.

Way 3. Find corrupted system files that slow down USB 3.0 external hard drive

If the USB 3.0 external hard drive contains corrupted system files, the file copying or data transferring speed will slow down naturally. SFC command line can efficiently help find and repair the corrupted system files on your external hard drive: 

Step 1. Press Windows + X simultaneously and click Command Prompt (Admin).

Step 2. Type the following cmd and hit enter:

• sfc /scannow
• sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows

Step 3. This will run a system file check and repair all corrupt system files on your PC and the external hard drive. 
After this, do remember to restart the computer.

Way 4. Clear and remove useless junk files on PC that make your USB 3.0 slow for file transferring

After using the computer for a very long time, a large number of useless junk files are taking space on the hard drive. And the best way is to apply a simple free way to clean and remove useless junk files that slow down your USB 3.0 external hard drive for transfer files and data. 
To make things easy for you, we'd like to recommend you try EaseUS Tools M for help. You can free download it here and follow to clean up junk files in Windows 10/8/7 now:

Step 1.  DOWNLOAD EaseUS Tools M for free and install it on your computer.

Step 2. Launch EaseUS Tools M in Windows PC. Select "Large File Cleanup" on the main screen.

Step 3. Select the drive and click "Scan" to let the program locate, find all large files on your disk.

Step 4. Identify and select useless large files and click "Delete" to remove those files from your PC or laptop. A message pops up and tells you this process will permanently delete the files. Click "Yes" to start the process.

Way 5. Convert USB 3.0 external hard drive to NTFS for a faster transfer rate

Last but one of the most useful ways to increase USB 3.0 external hard drive speed - to convert USB 3.0 external hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS for a faster data transfer rate. How?

Free partition manager software - EaseUS Partition Master Free can help. It enables you to convert the external hard drive to NTFS file system within three simple steps:

 

Step 1: Install and launch EaseUS Partition Master on your computer.

Step 2: Select a FAT32 partition, right-click on it and select "Convert to NTFS". If you need to convert a storage device such as SD card or USB flash drive to NTFS, insert it into your PC first and repeat the previous operation.

Step 3: Click "OK" on the pop-up dialog box to continue.

Step 4: Go to the upper left corner, click the "Execute 1 Operation" button and you will see the operation details. Click "Apply" and "Finish" when the process completes.

After this, you should be able to use your external hard drive at a fast data transferring or file copying speed in Windows PC now.