Windows Vista Speed Tip for Your Hard Drive

I found this by accident actually when I was trying to find out why the WDC 250 Gig HDD (WD2500JB-00GVA0) connected to my Sil0680 IDE card is so slooooooow. It turns out that it's running in Programmed I/O mode 0 (PIO mode 0). Oddly enough the other drive connected to the controller, a Samsung Spinpoint 160 gig HDD, is running in Ultra DMA mode. But once I hooked up the WDC drive to its own IDE channel (both were hooked up to the same cable w/ cable select setting), it's working like a charm in DMA 5 mode.

Anyways I noticed that if you go to the Properties window for a hard drive, and click on the Policies tab, there's a check box called "Enable advanced performance" which is not check by default. The text there says that you should enable use the feature if you have a backup power supply (UPS), which I do. This feature likely takes delayed write caching to a new level to further increase disk performance.

So if you have a UPS connected to your system, or you're running a laptop with a good battery, I recommend enabling this feature under Vista to help make your drive a little more speedy.