Skip to main content
Sign Out

Welcome to Dell

My Account
  • Place orders quickly and easily
  • View orders and track your shipping status
  • Create and access a list of your products
  • Manage your Dell EMC sites, products, and product-level contacts using Company Administration.
Sign In Create an Account Premier Sign In Partner Program Sign In
Contact Us

Article Number: 000125479

How to Improve Performance of External Hard Drive

Summary: Learn how to improve the performance of an external hard drive on a computer. Find steps to enable better performance option on an external hard drive.

This article may have been automatically translated. If you have any feedback regarding its quality, please let us know using the form at the bottom of this page.

Article Content

Instructions

If you notice a performance drop when an external hard drive is connected to your computer, the following settings can be enabled to help increase the performance:

  1. Press the Windows logo key + R on the keyboard.
  2. In the Run dialog box, type devmgmt.msc and press Enter key.
  3. In Windows Device Manager, expand the Disk drives category.
  4. Right-click the external hard drive and select Properties from the menu.
  5. Under the Policies tab, select to enable the following settings (Figure 1):
    • Better performance 
    • Enable write caching on the device

SLN318177_en_US__1I_HDD_Policies_Better_Performance_TM_V1
Figure 1: Enable Better performance and Enable write caching on the device on the external hard drive.

Note:
Ensure to use Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media option in the notification area to safely eject the external hard drive. Disconnecting the hard drive without using this option may lead to data loss or data corruption.
Enabling write caching on the device improves the performance of the hard drive. However, a power outage or equipment failure may result in data loss or data corruption.

The steps above will work to improve performance on the following Dell portable SSD storage devices:

  • Dell Portable SSD, USB-C 250GB (SD1-U0250)
  • Dell Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD, 500GB (SD1-T0500)
  • Dell Portable Thunderbolt™ 3 SSD, 1TB (SD1-T1000)

Article Properties

Affected Product

Dell Portable SSD, USB-C 250GB, Dell Portable Thunderbolt™ 3 SSD, 1TB, Dell Portable Thunderbolt™ 3 SSD, 500GB, Dell 1TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, Dell 500GB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0

Last Published Date

22 May 2024

Version

5

Article Type

How To

Back to Top