How to Increase External USB Hard Drive Speed in Vista?

Have you been scratching your head on how to speed up the external USB drive that you bought recently? Here is a  little tweak that will increase the performance of your external hard drive(s) by turning write caching on as well as activating advanced performance.

In Windows Vista, write caching isn’t enabled by default because removable devices could lose data if removed too quickly. This is great for USB thumb drives that are frequently inserted and removed, but in the case where you have a large hard drive in an external enclosure that’s never disconnected from your computer, this feature can drastically affect the performance. To enable write caching in Vista do the following:

- Click Start then right click on Computer and select Manage
- Click on Device Manager
- Expand the Disk drives branch and locate your external drive from the list
- Right click on the drive and select Properties
- On the Policies tab select Optimize for performance
- Check the boxes titled Enable write caching on the disk and Enable advanced performance as shown below
- Click the OK button and reboot for the settings to take effect

Well, that’s about it and now your external USB drive should be much faster than before.