Copy Speed 0 Bytes: How to Fix File Transfer Speed Drops to Zero Windows 10

How to Fix "Copy Speed 0 Bytes" Issue

"I have a mini PC with Windows 10 64-bit pre-installed. When I set it up this weekend and copy files to my USB drive, the speed is abysmal. It fluctuates wildly during copy or move. The USB transfer speed rarely exceeds 10MB/s, dropping to 0 every few seconds and hanging for a few minutes. It can take me hours to copy a folder with lots of files, and most of the time is wasted. Can someone help me?"

If you have the same issue, how to fix file transfer speed drops to zero on Windows 10? Here is all the solutions' outline.

Windows 10 has proved to be one of the most popular and stable operating systems to have seen the light of the day. Despite its extreme popularity, it also gets bogged down by its fair share of errors. One of the most persistent error is the file transfer to a drive, a USB, or over the network either totally stops or suffers from extreme lags while being processed.

On this page, we will provide workable methods to solve USB transfer speed drops to 0 problem. Let's check them out right away. 

Effective Solutions to File Transfer Speed Drops to Zero Windows 10

To solve file transfer speed drops to zero on Windows 10 when copying, first make sure you have Windows 10 updated to the latest version. Besides, check the antivirus that can cause slow file transfer speed on your PC. You can temporarily disable the antivirus to copy the data to memory, and re-activate it again when copying finishes.

After these two fixes, continue to use the practical methods below to figure out.  

1. Change the USB Port 3.0

Your computer has a variety of USB ports. If the USB drive or external hard drive supports USB 3.0/3.1, make sure you plug it inside a USB 3.0/3.1 port. A USB 3 port is usually blue. Switching to a proper port would improve copy speeds drastically and solve the copy speed 0 bytes problem. 

2. Update All Drivers 

Windows prefers to install its own drivers for computer peripherals, whereas using other drivers can result in decreased file transfer performance sometimes. Therefore, it is possible that updating the driver can fix the problem under discussion.

• Download the latest drivers for BIOS, Chipset, HDD and IDE Controllers.
• Open Device Manager.
• Right-click on the device you want to update the driver for and click Update driver.

3. Format File System from FAT32 to NTFS on USB/External Hard Drive/HDD

Sometimes the only reason a drive's copy speed showing 0 bytes is that it isn't formatted to a proper file system. So, you can format your USB drives or external hard drives from FAT32 to NTFS. This solution works for some. 

Qiling partition software is a popular disk partition management tool that is available for all disk or partition related jobs such as format disk partition as well as other full-around disk management solutions:

Tip: Before you format your USB drive or other devices to fix "file transfer speed 0 bytes" issue, you'd better back up your data to avoid data loss.

• Click the external drive or USB you intend to format and choose "Format".
• Set the Partition label, File system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and Cluster size, then click "Proceed".
• Check warning message and click "OK" to format the hard drive partition.

4. Defragment and Optimize Drives

With the built-in disk defragmentation utility in Windows, you can rearrange the files on a disk to occupy continuous storage space, which will speed up file access and fix USB transfer speed drops to 0 issue. To optimize your drives:

• Hit the Windows Key, and type defragment and click "Defragment and Optimize Drives" when you see the option.
• Select your system drive (generally C drive) and click Optimize.

5.  Disable Windows Auto-Tuning

If you are copying some data over the network, the auto-tuning feature can improve the performance for programs that receive TCP data over a network. But in some situations, disabling this feature might bring a faster copy speed.

Step 1. Press Windows key + X and select Command Prompt(Admin).

Step 2. Type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled and press Enter.

Step 3. Now try to transfer the files and check the data transfer speed. You can go to Command Prompt(Admin) again and type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal and press Enter to turn on the Auto-tuning again.

6. Disable Remote Differential Compression

The Remote Differential Compression task compresses data before it is sent over the network. This takes a considerable amount of time and can lead to congestion. Speed up the file copying, moving, or deleting process by disabling this process.

• Open Control Panel and select Programs and Features.
• Now select Turn Windows features on or off from the pane on the left-hand side.
• Search for Remote Differential Compression API Support and uncheck the box next to it.
• Click OK to save the changes.

Final Word

The above are some of the best ways to fix file transfer speed drops to zero Windows 10 and increase the speed of the copy-paste process for files. These methods will also work with USB

and external hard drive mobile transfers to the computer. File transfer speed is affected by a variety of factors, so you can try all the possible ways until the problem is solved.

File Transfer Speed Drops to Zero Windows 10 FAQs

The following are the three frequently asked questions about PC or USB file transfer speed drops to zero on Windows 10. How to fix the issues? Check the brief methods for these problems.

Why does USB transfer speed drop?

The fact that you observed a drop in speed shortly after writing the USB key is most likely due to the fact that the operating system's writes have been buffered: for performance reasons, your operating system does not write directly to the USB key, but directly to the so-called buffer cache, assuming there is no need to write to the file immediately. 

In most cases, it is perfectly fine to cache the write and actually write it later in the background (this is true for hard drives, but not necessarily for USB keys). This decline was caused by writing larger data in batches, and your operating system decided that it should no longer write to the buffer cache. 

Why is copying files so slow in Windows 10?

Why does my file transfer stop? The main reasons why does copying speed drop to 0 or why the speed of copying files to a USB is very slow can be:

• The USB is of very poor quality or uses the 2.0 protocol
• The ports of our computer are USB 2.0
• PC hardware problems
• The file format of USB flash drive or an external hard drive is not NTFS
• Virus or malware infection

How do I speed up copy and paste in Windows 10?

How to speed up file transfer in Windows 10? Try these tips:

• Set Explorer Settings to Realtime
• Change USB format to NTFS
• Get an SSD Drive
• Increase RAM
• Turn off Auto-Tuning
• Turn on Better Performance for USB drives
• Defragment Drives

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