Improve SATA (Serial-ATA) Hard Disk Drive Speed Performance in Vista

Windows Vista with SATA HDD (hard disk drive) can be optimized to run faster. If your system has a SATA (Serial-ATA) hard disk, which in fact, most new computers bought and delivered during the last one or two year should be configured with SATA disks, the following hack will guide you how to enable setting to improve SATA hard drive speed and performance.

1. Logon to Windows Vista with an Administrators group user account.
2. Go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Device Manager. Alternatively, right click on “Computer”, and select “Properties”. Then click on “Device Manager” on the left Tasks pane. Give User Account Control permission to Continue.
3. Expand the “Disk drives”, and find the SATA hard disk installed on the system.
4. Double click on the SATA HDD device or right click on the S-ATA HDD then select “Properties”.
5. Click on “Policies” tab.
6. Tick the check box of “Enable advanced performance” nested under “Enable write caching on the disk” to enable the SATA harddisk performance improvement. You may also have to select “Optimize for performance” instead of “Optimize for quick removal” if it’s not selected.

   

   This option is only selectable on SATA hard disk, else if using PATA or IDE hard disk, you won’t see the options, or the settings are grayed out or disabled. As pointed out in the illustration, enabling of advanced performance will hold more writable data in the memory cache to further improve disk performance, so it’s recommended only for disks with a backup power supply, such as system protected by UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) or notebook and laptop computer with charged cell battery pack to fall back. This configuration will increase the risk of data loss if the disk loses power.

7. Click OK, then exit from Device Manager.

Improved hard disk speed and performance will generally help to increase the system speed and improve performance of Vista.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.