Boost external hard drive performance

If you use an external hard drive enclosure as secondary storage for your vista computer system, or if you regularly use a USB storage device for large amounts of file transfers, you will benefit from this tip. By changing the way Vista handles writing data to USB storage devices, we can considerably boost the access speed and data transfer rate of said device.

By default, Windows Vista does not use write caching on USB drives, meaning that all data you send to the drive is instantly transferred to the device. Write caching acts as a buffer between the slow mechanical hard drive and the fast system memory. In essence, your computer writes to the cache (another area of memory) which then transfers the data sequentially to the drive, freeing up the rest of your system to do other things.

By enabling write caching on USB drives, you can increase the apparent performance of your external hard disk greatly. Note that flash memory devices will see little to no performance increase with this tweak.

To enable Write Caching on an external drive:

With your external USB drive plugged in and connected, go to 'start\computer.'

Right click the external drive in the computer window and choose 'properties.'

Click on the 'hardware' tab.

Highlight your external drive in the list and click the 'properties' button.

Select the 'policies' tab.

Choose the second option marked 'optimize for performance.' Click ok.

Important:Note that in order to prevent data loss, you will now have to use the 'safely remove hardware' icon in the taskbar whenever you want to remove your external drive. This is not necessary when shutting down the computer system though.