Learn how to turn on the advanced performance feature in Windows Vista to speed up your hard drive.
By default Windows Vista reads from a cache on your hard drive
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.
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.
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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.
I think you’re thinking of a hybrid drive.
@ 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.
This will save you a click or two:
Right click on computer, click on properties, then on the left side click on Device manager.
is it possible on other vista than on vista ultimate? I have business vista and checkboxes are always set to false, no mather what…
Outstanding. Thanks for this post. I made the change per your instructions and increased write performance 30% (Windows Server 2008)
Brent,
after reading this article and your response to Adrian Tsai, I’m a bit confused as to whether it is still necessary to have a battery backup on a desktop machine. Does the data stay in the cache indefinitely or is it transferred to the platters as soon as possible? If a power outage occurs, do I lose the data for the entire day or just in that moment before the power loss?
It transfers the data to the platters as soon as it can. You will only lose a very small portion of data but that data could be a very important file that Windows can’t run without.
You should always have a battery backup on your computer(s) for many reasons.
Brent,
Thanks for the quick response.
A battery backup such as a UPS?
Yes.
This setting is most suited for laptop hard drives which are usually slow and such setting can improve performance and the battery is always providing backup power.