How to Speed Up SATA Drives in Vista

As it happens with a lot of hardware items, hard drives are not usually used to their full potential by the operating system, when using the default settings. Obviously, I am talking about Windows Vista and the recent drives using the Serial ATA interface.

How is the above possible? Well, while Vista comes with built-in support for these drives, it only enables write caching, but advanced write caching features available only for SATA devices are not enabled.


As you probably figured it out already, I'll show you how to enable these features in Vista, speeding up your hard drive (unfortunately, you won't be able to speed up older drives that use the Parallel ATA interface).

- Press the Windows key+R, type "devmgmt.msc" and press Enter to open the Device Manager. If you want to follow the long way, then go to Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Device Manager, and you'll achieve the same result...

- Once the Device Manager opens, expand the Disk drives section and right click to bring up the context menu, then click on Properties.

- In the Device Properties window that appears, check Enable advanced performance in the Policies tab, and then press OK.

You can disregard the warning shown in the Policies tab, below the Enable advanced performance option, but be sure to backup your data on a regular basis, because with or without this feature enabled, data loss can occur, in case of power outage. Good luck and may you get a hard drive even faster than before!