Ran across this in another forum, and because you guys seem to honestly try to help, rather than reply with stupid comments "now why would you want to do that?", "or give totally non sequitur replies... I edited out the part where he insults other "helpers" for giving irrelevant "help"
ArcAiN6 replied on August 1, 2011
As for the 5 - 6mb/s transfer rate being " normal " it's not, that's slow for USB 2.0 or better. the actual cause of the problem is vinsta and win 7's approach to making USB devices safer to remove (in case of error during transfer i'm sure)
here's the way to get around that HUGE bottle-neck:
In Device Manager, right-click the USB drive in Disk drives folder, then select Properties, switch to Policies tab, and choose Optimize for performance. Click OK to keep it.
NOTE: If you use this method, make SURE you use the sub removal tool that pops up in your system tray when you first plugged in the device (system tray is the little area near your clock on the task bar)
After performing this fix for myself, my transfer rate on a cheapo cruizer micro went from 4.5 - 5mb/s to 20 - 30mb/s on small files, and average of 10 - 15mb/s on huge file transfers
This is because this method utelizes windows write-behind system of file management.