If you’ve use a USB hard drive in the past, you know that reading/writing files to/from an external drive is much slower than performing the same task on your internal hard drive. Because of the connection speed difference between a USB port and your internal IDE connection, this is always going to be the case when using a USB drive. The good news for Vista users is that there is a way to help speed things up a little bit when working with those external hard drives.
The problem with the way that Vista works with USB hard drive is that it treats all USB storage pretty much the same. With the popularity of USB thumb drives, Windows is used to having USB storage devices connected and disconnected frequently. In order to make it safe for the user to remove the USB storage at any time, Vista disables the write caching feature by default. If you’ve got a large external hard drive that is connected to your computer just about all the time, this isn’t as much of a concern.
When write caching is disabled, every time your system writes to the hard disk, you take a hit to your performance while the system waits for the hard drive to access the correct location and write the data. Generally, this little delay only lasts about 10 milliseconds, but that tiny delay results in a noticable decline in performance on most PCs. By enabling write cashing, when teh system sends a write to the hard disk, the logic circuit records the write in its much faster cache memory and then immediately sends a signal to Vista that the task is complete. Your system can then proceed to the next task. The data is actually written to the hard disk later on, but your system didn’t have to wait for it to happen. This is why write caching is great when it can be used.
To enable the write caching for your exernal hard drives in Vista, follow these steps.
- Go to the start menu, right click on Computer and select Manage.
- Choose Device Manager on the side menu.
- Click on the little + next to Disk Drives and find your external drive in list of hard disks.
- Once you find the correct drive, right click on the external drive and choose Properties
- On the Policies tab, make sure Optimize for performance is selected
- Check the boxes to enable Write Caching and Advanced Performance
- Select OK
- Reboot your system and you’re done!
While this little tweak will increase the performance of your external hard drive, I do need to mention the risk involved. Since write caching allows data to be written to the cache first, then the actual hard disk later, there is always the risk of data loss if your system freezes or loses power. I use a UPS power backup system on my computer so power loss is not a concern to me, but I realize that the vast majority of people do not have a power backup installed. Personally, I think this is a very effective performance tweak, but make sure you can afford to risk data loss or that you have power backup in place.
Leave Your Comments Below