Speed Up SATA Hard Drives in Windows Vista

Windows Vista has built-in support for Serial ATA(SATA) hard drives, but it doesn't automatically enable advanced write caching features.  You can speed up your computer by enabling this mode in the Device Manager.

You can quickly get to Device Manager by just typing device into the start menu search box.

Open the Disk drives section of the tree, and right-click on your hard drive, choosing Properties.


Select the Policies tab, and you should see this dialog:

Click the checkbox for Enable advanced performance, and you are done.


This tip will also work if you have an external hard drive that is always plugged into your computer, you can enable write caching to speed up performance significantly when writing to the disk.

Write caching isn't enabled by default for external drives because removable devices could lose data if you unplug them too quickly, so take care when using this setting.