Learn how to turn on the advanced performance feature in Windows Vista to speed up your hard drive.
Introduction
By default Windows Vista reads from a cache on your hard drive and writes directly to the hard drive, bypassing the cache. Reading and writing from your hard drive’s cache is much faster than from it’s platters. When you enable advanced performance on your hard drive it reads and writes from your hard drive’s cache making some operations faster.
This guide shows you how to speed up your hard drive by turning advanced performance on which makes Windows Vista use the hard drive’s cache as a buffer to read and write on your hard drive.
Warning: It’s only recommended to enable advanced performance on laptops or computers with redundant power supplies or battery backups. If your computer suddenly looses power you could corrupt or lose data.
Enable Advanced Performance
- Right-click Computer in the Start Menu and then select Options.
- Click Advanced system settings on the left.
- Select the Hardware tab in the System Properties window.
- Click the Device Manager button.
- Expand Disk Drives.
- Right-click a hard drive under Disk Drives and select Properties.
- Select the Policies tab in the Device Properties window.
- Check off Enable advanced performance.
- Click OK to save the changes and restart your computer.
By Adrian Tsai on November 24th, 2007 at 8:14 am #
re: Enable Advanced Performance on Your Hard Drive
This article is incorrect. The cache on a hard disk drive is not there to protect data in case of a power loss. It is there to increase performance by providing a very fast, low-latency cache of recently read data. Since the cache is actually faster than reading/writing to the hard drive, bypassing this cache can significantly decrease hard drive performance.
However, disabling the cache will increase safety. If a power loss occurs, all contents of the cache will be lost. Since data may not have been written to the hard drive before the cache was destroyed, data loss may occur if a power outage occurs.
By Brent Trahan on November 24th, 2007 at 12:51 pm #
I think you’re thinking of a hybrid drive.
By Brent Trahan on November 28th, 2007 at 11:31 am #
@ Adrian
Sorry about that. It must have been a late night when I wrote that guide. It was all backwards. I fixed it.
Thanks for pointing it out.
By Marc Smith on August 4th, 2008 at 9:46 am #
This will save you a click or two:
Right click on computer, click on properties, then on the left side click on Device manager.
By sogun on August 8th, 2008 at 2:52 am #
is it possible on other vista than on vista ultimate? I have business vista and checkboxes are always set to false, no mather what…