Fix Vista “Calculating time remaining” on flash drive
Posted on February 25th, 2012 by whinger. Filed under Tech.
I’ve recently changed laptop to one with Vista64, which bothered me because I’ve stuck stubbornly with XP; however I’ve been impressed with the speed and usability of what is now a pretty stable OS.
One thing, though, that’s been really annoying me is that copying and deleting files on USB flash disks has suddenly added an extra layer of irritation: a “calculating time remaining” message that usually takes about 5 times as long as the actual operation. Quite how you can take 5 minutes to delete a file is beyond me.
The solution seems quite simple: change the settings for the flash drive from “optimize for quick removal” to “optimize for performance”. The problem simply goes away.
This is definitely a bug – the amount of time we’re talking about here is massive and isn’t explainable by write caching; however at least now I can cope. I just have to remember to click “remove” on the device before pulling the stick, but to be honest I always do that anyway.