Proactive PC Maintenance - Speed up SATA hard drives in Vista

Vista can be tweaked to improve the performance of internal SATA hard drives. Vista's write cache has two levels. Vista enables the more basic of which by default. To really enhance the performance of your SATA hard drives you can enable the 'advanced disk performance' mode.

However you should take note that this tip has the potential to damage your Vista installation. By extending write caching (data held in memory to be written eventually to hard drive) you heighten the risk of damaging your system files should a crash or power outage occurr, which is why Vista recommends that this setting only be changed on systems with a backup battery such as a laptop or systems with an attatched UPS. That said, you will experience an increase in the performance of the drive, so ensure you weigh up the pros and cons before you enable this setting.

To enable advanced performance on a SATA internal drive:
• Go to Start>Computer
• Right-click the SATA drive in the computer window and choose Properties
• Click on the Hardware tab.
• Highlight your SATA drive in the list and click the Properties button.
• Select the Policies tab.
• Select the Enable Enhanced Performance option. Read the warning.
• Click OK
Did you find this post helpful? Do you have any performance enhancing tips of your own you would like to share?
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