Improving Vista's Hard disk performance

[gxsaurav]

I was just going through the device manager in Vista, when I found something new. I searched on the internet to find more about this tooooo cool feature. More like DMA Next.

Here is the thing, if you are buying a new computer don't buy IDE hard disk anymore. It makes a lot of sense by going with SATA 2.0. If you already have SATA 2.0 HD or even SATA 1.0 then you are lucky & will enjoy much more I\O performance over Windows XP in Windows Vista.

Most of the hard disks these days have 8 MB or 16 MB buffer, whether SATA or IDE. In Windows Vista you can increase the performance with a Catch (obviously) for these drives

1) Open device manager->Right click on the hard disk & click on properties.

2) Go to policies tab & check the box as shown below.



Now Vista will use the cache of your HD to increase the performance. But here is the catch, Do not use this feature on a desktop without UPS or a Laptop without properly charged Battery.When you have some data in the cache it is not written to the hard disk until the cache is full. Suppose you are working on something & power cuts all of a sudden, you will lose all the data currently in the Cache if it is not already written.

My understanding is that by enabling this, the data can be written to the hard drive’s cache, but the physical writing to disk can be delayed to prevent I/O backups, you need only worry about a complete power loss or reseting your system's power if it hangs. Use this tweak only with a stable system with proper drivers & if you are testing over clocking do not turn this feature on till your computer is stable

What it means to you? Nothing, enable this feature only if you have a SATA Hard disk (preferred) with 8 MB cache buffer or more along with a UPS\Laptop battery.


You can try this feature with old harddisks with 2 MB buffer, but it's not recomended cos 2 MB Cache fills quickly anyway.

On Windows XP 32bit a feature like this is not available. Well, you better wait for Hybrid harddisks anyway. this feature will give you at max 10% system performance but huge I\O performance (copying, moving etc) increse.

P.S. - Another feature exclusive to Vista so far & a reason to switch to Vista with new PCs

[shantanu]

hey man this is also present in Windows Xp x64, and it did took away my new SATA HDD that time i got it replaced ,but its a good option for those who are haivng a Laptop or UPS and Supllies which cant go off at the time of power cut,...

[gxsaurav]

Glad you informed shantanu. Like I said above, do not use this feature unless you have a SATA HD with atleast 8 MB buffer & a UPS

This is a harddisk specific feature which Vista just gives an option to turn on.

[shantanu]

yeah !!! you edited it after wards !! it was not written before

and i had a Hitachi SATA that time with a Good UPS, just once, by mistake while shutting down windows , i turned of the UPS before complete shutdown, and BAM

[assasin]

^^^ but nothing like that has ever happened to me.i've that option enable from the day i'm using vista,and many a times its has happened that i've run my pc without ups and faced power cuts.but data didnt get corrupted.
at present i've a RAID 0 setup so cant enable that option.
my hdd :2*160GB WD Caviar with 16MB buffer

[shantanu]

gr8 , its good that you didnt face this problem, i pray to god that you dont i know coz i had this problem, a long long time back.... and its the worst which can happen, so just choose to write it down here , so that people think on it before trying. hope you understand.

[gxsaurav]

Ok, I did it..

Turned the feature on then worked a bit, like the usual & bam, pressed the reset button. Computer restarted, but no data loss. but still, be careful with a UPS