If you have a laptop or PC that supports USB 2 or better still the faster 3 standard, but you find that transferring data to and from your USB device still seems to be taking a long time, it could be because your write cache has been turned off on your external device.
To check whether this is the case, go to Device Manager and expand the Disk Drives heading and double click on the entry for your USB drive. Click on the Policies tab. If you are running Windows 7, then simply select the Better performance option. If you have Vista or XP, click on Optimize for performance.
Note that if you do select this option, then you should always ensure you use the Safely Remove Hardware notification when it comes to disconnecting your USB device and not simply pull it out! If you frequently connect and disconnect your USB devices, such as your USB memory sticks, then it is probably best not to enable write cache.