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Speed up Your External Hard Drives with Vista

Windows Vista Guides, Windows XP Guides Add comments

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Speed up External Drives

The default setting in Windows Vista disables write caching for external drives. This is done so that you can eject the drive at any time without data loss. If you are willing to eject your drive each time, you can increase the performance of your external hard drives.

In this guide, we will turn write caching back on and activate advanced performance.

  1. Click on the Start Button and type in Device Manager in the search box. Hit Enter.

    Speed up External Drives

  2. Click on the + Next to Disk Drives.

    Speed up External Drives

  3. Right click on your external hard drive and select Properties.

    Speed up External Drives

  4. Select the Policies tab and select Optimize for performance.

    Speed up External Drives

  5. Next, check Enable write caching on the disk and Enable advanced performance. (If the drive is a USB external hard drive. My example shows flash memory.)
  6. Click OK and reboot your computer.

You’re done. Be sure to check my other guides on and .

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