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Speed up Hard Drive Performance in Vista
Posted by Adam Pash at 7:00 AM on April 3, 2008
Windows Vista tip: Web site OCModShop details how to speed up your hard drive performance in Vista by tweaking an advanced setting to enable write caching and advanced performance on your SATA hard drive. The net effect of this tweak should certainly bring improved disk performance, but there is a catch: If you're not using a backup power supply—either a battery on your laptop or an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on your desktop—enabling these features increases the likelihood of data loss in the event of a power outage. Either way, this tweak is worth a look if you're looking to beef up your disk performance, and besides—you should already be using a UPS anyway.
Tags: hard drives | performance | vista | windows | windows vista tip
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
The How-To Geek
Posted 7:23 AM 3/4/08
That website appears to be down... here's the same tweak from a site that was linked on lifehacker before:
[www.extremetech.com]
Original lifehacker link:
[lifehacker.com]
The How-To Geek
noobtastic
Posted 7:16 AM 3/4/08
So basically this is only safe for laptops or desktops with UPS?
noobtastic
oufan199
Posted 10:51 AM 3/4/08
This tip doesn't work on everybody's hard drive. I tried this tweak a couple of weeks ago and thought that my hard drive was faster, only to find out that the changes were undone by the system. No matter how many times I tried to change it, it always reverted back to the default.
oufan199
JorgeBurgos
Posted 4:53 PM 3/4/08
@noobtastic If you have reasonable trust in your power supply then it should be fine. The chances that you made an absolutely critical change within the last few seconds before the power going out are pretty slim, unless your building is subject to frequent blackouts.
You can achieve a similar effect on Ubuntu (and it does work):
[www.lesswatts.org]
It has the added benefit of reducing your machine's power usage.
JorgeBurgos
jyjohnson
Posted 12:20 AM 4/4/08
No XP joy?
jyjohnson
vfreak
Posted 12:18 AM 4/4/08
Thanks! I've known about this but since reinstalling windows I forgot to do it. I've now made a folder of URL links for tweaks to do when reinstalling windows. (yeah, I feel kid-of geeky). lol
vfreak
Neel_Relaxation
Posted 2:12 AM 4/4/08
This technique does not work for hybrid drives (readydrive..intel turbo memory) in Vista i.e those that have non-volatile cache. I turned off readydrive on my notebook because it actually slows down disk access in some situations since the HDD has to spin up for non-cached data. Yet I still cannot enable write caching for the drive...it says 'This device does not allow it's write cache setting to be modified' :/
Anyway, from the HDD POV, I find that keeping the drives defragmented also helps a lot in optimizing performance, since Vista tends to access the drive often (even with 2 GB RAM). I stuck in a good auto defragmenter and set it to deal with fragmentation that arises from frequent file activity on my work notebook. Like a disease, fragmentation spreads through my files if unchecked and it's effect is quite noticeable. I used to defrag on a schedule every few days, but I find that auto defrag is the most time and resource efficient solution to this problem.
Neel_Relaxation
Webran61
Posted 4:53 AM 4/4/08
I don't know if I want to mess with the registry for this.
Also, with the first of the two tweaks, does that mean that it will stop telling you the free space of your hard drives completely? I kind of need to know that information.
Webran61
randomvariable
Posted 11:23 AM 3/4/08
Enabling this option actually turns on buggy behaviour from Windows 3.11.
[technet.microsoft.com]
randomvariable
randomvariable
Posted 11:22 AM 3/4/08
Be aware that this "tweak" is actually a workaround for a database application that called sync() far too often, because Windows 3.11 had a bug that meant data was never flushed to the hard drive. Enabling "advanced performance" simply turns off the system call, breaking the specification and giving Vista a bug from Windows 3.11.
- [technet.microsoft.com]
randomvariable