How-To Geek
Speed Up SATA Hard Drives in Windows 7 or 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 Device Manager.
You can quickly get to Device Manager by just typing device into the start menu search box. (Or from the command line, devmgmt.msc)
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.
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Comments (17)
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- Published 03/6/07
Does this work with ATA drives? I don’t know a lot about hard drives.
This might not be a good idea. See:
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=11558&hl=Enable+advanced+performance
Hi, I can adjust this setting but Vista automatically disables it after pressing OK (If I reopen de settings, I see the box is unchecked…)
Now what?
@Anonymous
From reading that article, it seems like enabling this option can speed things up quite a bit under some circumstances.
I have the same problem as zoxor…
Vista will not accept my attempts to
check the boxes. I click ok and
when I look later the boxes are unchecked.
If you are running a RAID array, eventhough Vista sees the array as a disk drive, you cannot set the settings on. This is generally accomplished through the RIAD console of your controller.
I was just curious; what constitutes a ‘loss of power’?
Just an editorial: In this sentence you may want to add “go to properties” before “select the policies tab”. May be easier for the “uninitiated”.
“Open the Disk drives section of the tree, and right-click on your hard drive. Select the Policies tab, and you should see this dialog:”
@whs
Thanks for the note… I updated the article, and added another screenshot while I was at it. Much better!
Hi I am trying to put a SATA drive with windows vista (corupt) in an external drive and then pull the data off the drive by copying to an XP machine. The drive, when I click on the E drive, asks if I want to format the drive. Is there a way to get at the data?
I am having the same issue as above. Make the changes, it goes away. Maybe I should go into BIOS?
I’m having the same problem as julian & zoxor, did someone ever provide a solution? I have a acer laptop with a hitachi hard drive.
turn off the horrid UAC, then try.
my question is somewhat different. i have 2 hard drives on my computer and i wanted to know how can i choose which hard drive i want that program to load on. im also running windows vista.when downloading it doesn’t give me a choice like xp did. can anyone give me some help here. thank you
You can choose your driver by clicking my computer on the left panel, when you see your drive you want on the right double click it and finaly you can save it there
I have no options :S
nice.