Speed up SATA Drives in Vista
We showed you in a previous tip how to increase performance with USB drives in Vista by enabling write caching. By default this option isn’t turned on because of the “removable” nature of these devices, so you could lose data if you pull out too quickly (the drive that is… ).
Internal SATA hard drives are alot more “permanent” than USB drives, but Windows Vista does not enable advanced write caching by default. You can increase performance of your hard drives by implementing a little-known feature. You could potentially lose data in a power outage, so either use a UPS or enable advanced write caching at your own risk.
Regardless of the minor risk involved, you can enjoy better hard drive performance from Windows Vista by enabling Advanced Write Caching on your SATA devices
This procedure is actually very simple. Open up Device Manager: there are several ways to do this…
- Right-click on Computer and selecting Manage. Device Manager will be in the Computer Management list on the left
- type “device” in the search dialog of the Start Menu
- type “devmgmt.msc” in a Run dialog (Win + R)
Once in Device Manager, open up the Disk drives branch. You will see all of the hard drives currently connected to your PC.
Right-click on the hard drive you want to modify, and select Properties.
Click the Policies tab, and you should see two options: Enable write caching on the disk, and Enable advanced performance (which is probably unchecked). Click the box next to “Enable advanced performance“, and click OK.
You should repeat the procedure for any other drives you have attached to your system. Again, note that there is some risk involved of data loss, but in reality this isn’t a big deal: if the power goes out, then you would have lost that Word document no matter what your drive cache setting. The most likely candidate for unwritten data at any given time is probably virtual memory or other OS-specific information. If you’re really concerned about data loss, then you’re probably using a UPS anyway.
7 Comments
Buy an Adaptec RAID card with on-board battery instead. This feature prevents Windows from telling the drive to flush the write cache to disk after something important has been written. You can lose your whole partition. Don't use this option. In UNIX, it is similar to no fsync.
I'm amazed at the amount misinformation on this page.
Trust me: Don't use Advanced Performance.
This is correct, it does improve the performance, but i'm never gona use this feature again. Where i live, power outages are common (4-5 times a year at lest)
And, corrupted hard drive(s)! I have got corrupted hard drives 6 or 7 times now, and lost everything that is stored on them, because of this. So if there is a slight chance of power outage, do not, -i repeat, DO NOT use this feature!!
Martini, Write Caching CAN NOT kill hard drives, surges kill hard drives. And even then, the files can be retrieved, for a fee. With Autosave features these days, the risk is utterly minute. These feature is great for BitTorrent and Media Center users. And if you're worried about data loss, try Google Docs!
NTFS is a journaling (transactional) file system, so it would roll back incomplete transactions, right?
Guys, take a look at http: technet.microsoft.com en-us magazine 2007.04.windowsconfidential.aspx
It's a microsoft.com page, and it says the checkbox should be re-named to "Restore old buggy behavior." I'd say, do not enable the advanced perf. mode, it's good for nothing n re-introduces a windows 95 era bug to vista. God Bless.
I'm doing some benchmarks and will let you guys know how much of a performance boost you can expect. If the difference is negligable then it might not be worth it, but if there's a significant improvement then I say invest in a $40 UPS and turn it on.