Hard drive speed boosts

How to Increase Hard Drive Performance in Vista​

   Information

This will show you how to increase the hard drive performance by enabling Advanced Performance, disabling NTFS from creating 8.3 versions of file names, and defragging on a regular schedule.

   Note

You can follow all the steps below, or just pick the ones you would like to do.

STEP ONE

Enable Advanced Performance for Hard Drive

   Warning

This option enables extremely aggressive write caching that will speed up the hard drive's performance, but it can also cause you to lose data in the drive's cache if you lose power suddenly. It is not recommended for laptops that run on battery power all the time. While this is fine for the normal home desktop, it may not be a good idea if you have unreliable power.

   Note

This may not be supported by some hard drive setups (Ex: RAID). If it does not, then you will see that it will just change back to the default settings automatically when you look at the Properties again.

1. Open the Control Panel. (Classic View)​

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2. Click on the Device Manager icon.​

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3. Click on Continue in the UAC prompt.​

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4. Close the Control Panel.​

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5. Click on Disk drives to expand it. (See screenshot below)​

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6. Right click on your hard drive device listing and click Properties.​

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7. Click on the Policies tab. (See screenshots below)​

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8. For a ATA (Parallel) or Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Drive​

A) Check the Enable write caching on the disk box. (See left screenshot below step 10)​

NOTE: This should already be checked by default.​

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B) Check the Enable Advanced performance box.​

NOTE: If this will not stay checked for you, then check to make sure that you have the latest chipset drivers installed for your motherboard. Also see: Write-Caching - Enable or Disable - Windows 7 Forums​

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9. For an External Hard Drive​

A) Dot Optimize for performance. (See right screenshot below step 10)​

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10. Click on OK to apply.​

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STEP TWO

Disable NTFS from Creating 8.3 Versions of File Names for Backwards Compatiblity with DOS

NOTE: You will not need this unless you work with DOS or the command prompt and have long file names.

1. Open the Start Menu.​

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2. In the white line (Start Search) area, type regedit and press Enter.​

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3. Click on Continue in the UAC prompt.​

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4. In regedit, go to: (See screenshot below)​

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem​

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5. In the right pane, right click on NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation and click on Modify.​

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6. Type 1 and click on OK. (See screenshow below)​

NOTE: To enable it again, type 0 (number) instead.​

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7. Close regedit.​

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STEP THREE

Defrag the Hard Drive on a Regular Schedule

1. If you use Vista's Disk Defragmenter, see the link below on how to create a automatic defrag schedule.​

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How to Change the Schedule for Disk Defragmenter in Vista​

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2. If you do not like Vista's Disk Defragmenter, you can use a 3rd party program instead. Auslogics Disk Defrag is a great program that has a status graph of the hard drive's defragmentation progress, but the free version does not have a automatic defrag schedule. Here is the link:​

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Disk Defrag - Best Free Defrag Software For Your Hard Drive​

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3. Here is a recommended schedule of times to defrag.​

NOTE: The more you save and delete items off your hard drive, the more often you should defrag. Adjust to your needs.​

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Scheduled Time	Description
Once a Month	For a user that is only on the computer a few hours a week and does not do much file saving and deleting. You rarely install and uninstall programs.
Once a Week	For most average users that use the computer for a few hours on a daily basis and does a lot more file saving and deleting. You only do a few installing and uninstalling of programs.
Once a Day	For your power user that uses the computer for several hours a day and does an unbelievable amount of file saving and deleting. You do a lot of installing and uninstalling of programs.

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Enjoy faster performance,
Shawn

Related Tutorials

---

• How to Speed Up the Performance of Vista
• How to Disable or Enable Low Disk Space Warning in Vista
• How to Shrink and Create a Partition with Disk Management in Vista
• How to Delete and Extend a Partition with Disk Management in Vista
• How to Change a Drive Icon in Vista
• How to Show or Remove Drive Letters from Displaying in Vista
• How to Rename a Drive in Vista
• How to Add, Change, or Remove a Drive Letter in Vista
• How to Restrict or Unrestict Drive Access in Vista
• How to Hide or Unhide a Drive in Vista
• How to Create a Drive Shortcut in Vista

 

[Brink]

Nothing really to check in them other than to turn them off so that they are not running in the background causing the hard drive to run a lot.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/69564-index-enable-disable.html

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/72832-disk-defragmenter.html

You can also look in the Resource Monitor under the Disk section to see what is running that is using up the HDD disk.

 

[Gnys]

From the resource monitor at a certain point it's hard to tell because the background operations are changing back and forth. I used the Auslogics defrag program and it stated that my PC is not optimized although the elaboration wasn't provided.
After a period of the time the programs in the background disappear and it does seem to run smoothly but whatever I may engage their seems to be some sort of hesitation from the hard drive and that's what I don't understand. I've never witnessed this before on a 500GB and Vista absolutely operated smoothly regardless of the performance tweaks.
Do you think it's got something to do now with the firmware?

 

[Brink]

You might see if clearing the temp files may help any. Otherwise I'm not certain what is causing this hesitation either.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/104637-temporary-files-temp-folder.html

 

[shortmantuff]

When enabling advanced performance for hard drive and a poer outage happens, will this just randomly loss or corrupt files on your hard drive or files that are open when it happens?

 

[Brink]

Hello Shortmantuff,

Only if it was in the middle of being saved to the hard drive, otherwise you would just loose whatever that was in the cache. It's usually not a problem though unless you have a lot of power outages though.

 

[microdude431]

Never knew about this, thanks!

 

[Brink]

You're welcome Microdude.

 

[Macavity]

Thank you Brink. I didn't come across either setting when I was speeding up my hard drive the first time around.

The new release of Auslogics Disk Defrag is impressive. But I do worry if the increased speed is at the cost of effectiveness.

 

[shortmantuff]

Ditto. It's insanely fast, but hope it doesn't effect it.

 

[joeturbo]

my reboot time was 325seconds, just by turning this on it has gone down to 241seconds. will carry on tweeking, many thanks

 

[tom982]

Hey Shawn, your links broken:

8. For a ATA (Parallel) or Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Drive -

A) Check the Enable write caching on the disk box. (See left screenshot below step 10)
NOTE: This should already be checked by default.

B) Check the Enable Advanced performance box.
NOTE: If this will not stay checked for you, then check to make sure that you have the latest chipset drivers installed for your motherboard. Also see: How to Fix Can't Enable Hard Drive Advanced Write Caching in Vista
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Tom
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[Brink]

Thank you Tom. Link substituted for another one.

 

[hariharan]

Good tutorial.

 

[Brink]

Thank you Hari. I'm glad that you liked it.

 

[Slammer]

Ok I have a couple questions. First, for #1 does "data loss" refer to files and open programs you're working with? Or does it also apply to operating files and the like, that could mess up your computer if power is lost? I ask because it seems like something I want to do, but I've been having an odd issue lately where my computer has a unique freeze up (I still have a thread started about it if anyone wants to take a look. It's one of two that I've made so it should be easy to find by clicking my user name or whatever). Anyway, I haven't figured it out yet but it could be HD related, so if this tweak will potentially cause OS instability when power is lost I'd like to know.

Second, could someone clarify the NOTE on step two? I use the cmd prompt sometimes (not heavily though) so I'd like to know exactly how it'll affect the use of that, it wasn't very clear. Thanks for the great guide though!

 

[Brink]

Hello Adam,

For #1, it's not going to affect the stability of Vista. It's referring to whatever data happens to be in the write cache before it is finished actually written to the HDD if you were to lose power or freeze up. Of course, this would be the case for anything that's not saved anyway.

If you use really long file names (ex: 25+ characters or more) and use them in DOS, then you wouldn't want to do STEP TWO. The link below can help give you more details about the purpose of the 8.3 file name format to help decide if you really needed it or not. If not, then turning it off can help Vista gain a tiny bit of performance by not having to convert long file names for the 8.3 format.

8.3 filename - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Slammer]

Ok thanks. Definitely going to do the first one then. Won't make a bit of difference in my situation. And I think I'll go for step two as well, and just revert it if for some reason I need to. One last thing: I tried it several years back on an mp3 player that wouldn't work (I had no idea what it did at the time and I was just desperately trying things) and it pretty much rendered it useless. And halved it's capacity. Ever since then I've been pretty weary of the built-in defrag system. So how stable is the defrag? How resource intensive is it? How long will it take? (300 gig) Is there anything I should be worried about when using it? Anything to avoid? Thanks

 

[Brink]

The built-in defrag feature of Vista is good, but it's slow. You might consider using the free program Auslogics Disk Defrag if you find it to slow.

 

[Slammer]

Ok. I'll try to build up the courage to use it sometime. I tried Smart Defrag, but I was trying to use it to consolidate all the free space at the end of my drive so that I could have enough free space there to make another partition, but it didn't work. Then I tried another one (I can't remember the name of it) but it had a very similar interface and took literally two hours to do 2% of my drive so I just ditched the idea. But I'll give it a whirl and see how it goes. Can you give me an estimate for how long it should take ish? Thanks!

Oh. It said that with less than 10% free space it reduces performance. That might be why I've had bad experiences with defraging in the past.

 

[Brink]

Sorry, but there's no way for me to know how long it will take to defrag it on your computer.