All About Technology

Speed Up SATA Hard

Drives & USB Drives In

Windows Vista Window

Vista has built in support

for SATA and external

drives, but they seem to be

slow because the advanced

write cache features aren’t

automatically activated.

With just few steps you

can enable them and get a

much faster response. First

you need to go to the

Device Manager which you

can go directly by just

typing device in the start

menu search box or just

type in devmgmt.msc in

command line. Now open

the Disk drives section and

right click on your hard

drive. Now click on the

Policies tab and you’ll find

this dialog box: Now click

the checkbox for Enable

advanced performance,

and you are done. Write

caching isn’t enabled by

default as removing

devices directly without

using the “Safely remove

removable device”may

lose your data, so be

cautious when enabling

this options. But enabling

this option also when

speeding up performance

significantly when writing

to the disk. Now select the

external drive and double

click it to open up the

properties screen. Then

just change the setting to

“Optimize for

performance” and hit OK to

continue. You’ll have to

reboot for all the settings to

take effect. Next time you

boot into Windows Vista

you’ll see faster bootup

times and better disk

writing performance.