How to improve performance of an external HDD drive in Windows

PC, Gaming & Console Lobby
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Guys,

Recently, discovered an amazing trick and am really shocked that this settings can
speed up a data transfer of up to 10 times more! - I guess its really benefits the older generations of the older external hdds. Do try this out! Happy to share ! :slight_smile:

  • Tactful do always safely remove the drive before plugging out *

hdd
hdd1078Ă—937 99.9 KB

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that’s old tip from many years ago. But glad you knew it. better late than never

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Awesome ! Thanks man! Works like a charm! Didn’t realise it, writing to the disk is like 10x faster now!!

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For SATA/SCSI connected devices, write caching is normally enabled by default.

For USB connected device, the default setting is for quick removal (data safety reasons). A word of warning if write caching is enabled for USB devices, any sudden disconnect when there is a write transaction may corrupt data or worst case the volume itself. Make sure your USB disk connection is well secured.

Just wanna make sure one is aware of the risk…

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Fair warning as there is a possible risk of data corruption but it is really not as scary or bad as it make out to be. I have did a couple of tests many years ago with a normal external USB HDD and I deliberately disconnected the cable by yanking out the USB cable in the middle of a transfer in the name of experimentation. I recalled there were about 7 or 8 3D BD ISO files in it. the capacity was 1TB and I did the experiment 3 times, and guess what, nothing happens. the existing files remained, the HDD still rcognized by the OS each time.

I’m not saying that the HDD volume or content will not be corrupted or gone but just trying to tell everyone although there is a risk but when “accident” happens, there is a still a high chance that your HDD or files will be safe. So I wouldnt worry too much about the warning based on my experience. Of course, don’t put your sensitive and important data into a drive and deliberately go and test it lar.

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I’m a bit scared to just pull it out. It happened once to me on the android tv box, but not computer. Turns out under the android tv box there is an option to eject disk. I found the structure to be corrupted.

Luckily I managed to recover the data using 7 disk, lengthy process but managed to salvage the data, was like 2tb of data in it…

Nowadays the disk size is like 8-16tb, tons of data… don’t want to risk it man…