The low speed of your external hard drive is usually just a problem of system tweaking. Try the following two solutions in order to increase the speed of your external hard disk. The first thing you can do is to open My Computer, right-click on your external hard drive and select Properties. Select the Hardware panel, choose your drive and select Properties again. Go to Policies and select "Optimize for performance". For Windows 7 and Vista, you can also select "enable write caching on the disk". Hit OK and exit. If this doesn't solve your problem, try a second method. Go to Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools and Services. From the newly opened list, stop the process called Background Intelligent Transfer Service. Also, right-click on it, select Properties and switch the Startup type manual or disable it.