Vista users-Increase your hard drive performance

I found two easy and free ways to increase your hard drive performance under Vista, online.

The first, i only reccomend doing if you're running a laptop, or a desktop with a UPS. This is because it can cause data loss if the power goes out while your saving a file, but unless you live in a power-surge prone area, the risk is low.

Method 1: Simply open up your device manager (right click on computer in start menu, properties, and its on the left hand side of the window) and click on the + box for hard drives. Right click on the hard drive and go to the "Policies" tab. "Enable write caching" Should already be enabled by default, leave that as is. However, "Enable Advanced performance" is never checked by default because you may be installing Vista on a computer without a backup power supply. If you do have one though, there is no risk in checking this option, which makes it great for laptop users and UPC users.


Method 2: One of Window's biggest shortcomings is that it tries to maintain backwards compatibility with things that no one used for the last decade or so. One such example is that NTFS creates 8.3 Versions of File Names for Backwards Compatiblity with DOS. This increases the time it takes to write any file. Unless you use DOS or the command prompt a lot, this is safe to disable. Go to Run, type in regedit and press Enter. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem. In the right pane, right click NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation and click Modify. Type 1 and click OK, and your done. Change this back to 0 to re-enable the setting if you need it for something.


Hope these tips helped...HD Tune used to report an average speed of 54MB/s for my hard drive before these tweaks, and now it reports close to 60. Not an earth shattering gain, but hey, its free and it takes less than three minutes, so why not?

Peace.


p.s i wasn't sure which section to put this in, so if its in the wrong place feel free to move it.

 

I don't know about the first one.
Everything that gets written into the cache will eventually need to be written to the hard drive and that's when the performance you gained will be lost.

But anyways, good to know about that./

 

Nope...The performance hit comes from the rest of your PC (which is MUCH faster than your hard drive) having to wait for your hard drive to write the file before it starts sending other commands. With write caching enabled, your PC is effectively decoupled from your slow hard drive. Your hard drive will still take just as long to write files, but your faster components wont have to wait for it.


p.s that's the one which is checked by default.

 

Sorry, but still don't get it (I'm thinking pipeline):

Suppose Write back to Disk costs 5.
All other instructions including write back to cache cost 1.

Runtime may be faster(assuming it ends in the last WBC), but as the attached image shows, the system will accumulate the write backs to disk and performance will decrease because you're no longer making effective use of pipelining.



Am I correct?

 

Thanks for the tips, but I personally stop tweaking Window since Vista

cheers ...

 

the trick is, if you check that box, your os is allowed to say "yup, file saved" to your programs while they're not yet really saved. and it then saves them behind your back while it doesn't do anything else.

the result: any file save will be much faster.


so actually, you finally do make good use of pipelining. pipelining only works if you don't have to wait for the end of the pipe.

the problem is, you don't know if the end really does it's work well => you might have saved something, that never made it to disk due to a power out.

 

You might want to read this:

http://yayitsandrew.com/2008/02/13/vista-enable-advanced-performance-benchmark/

 

So this just re-enables a bug that old programs relied on? What ever happened to forcing developers to properly fix software?

 

hahaha that made me laught. if that would have worked, vista would not be hated all over the world. UAC would never have been a problem, drivers would not have failed even half a year after the product launch, and win7 wouldn't now have to bring a virtual xp with it to "please the customers"..

but yes, i'd love to punch all those lazy programmers in the face

still, the option should be helpful, espencially for those with bad ssds that have terrible write performance from time to time. as the os does not have to flush to disk at every write. but it does mean the app doesn't know if data really got saved..

 

Do you know similar configurations to increase hard drive performance in XP? Thanks

 

it's identical at identical places.

 

So vista and xp configurations for increasing hard disk performance are just the same?

 

well, those two tips at least are at the same place, the same way set. so, yes..


my tip for increasing hdd performance: get an ssd. plan only for this. it's the best thing you can do.. (and then, drop xp if you can, and experience a modern os on a modern system with a modern disk.. and fall in love with it ).

 

- the "ssd" link you posted is broken

 

i've not posted an ssd link. that's from the advertisingtool on notebookreview..

just google "ssd thread" and you'll find the notebookreview thread about it

 

If only they weren't still in the 2+ dollar per gigabyte range, while hard drives are in the 16 cents per gig. Oh well, Moore's law is our friend.

p.s 7 demolishes Vista for SSD performance, they realy took the time to optimize for the newer drives:

http://gizmodo.com/5272585/windows-7-vs-windows-vista-ssd-edition

 

actually, 7 performs here identical on the intel ssd as vista. the changes they did are not much. auto-detecting and disabling defragmentation, superfetch etc if needed (but all auto-detections failed here so far.. so much for that haha, and yes, i'm on the final version), and support for trim, which my ssd doesn't have, and, is overrated.

so, no, 7 does not demolish vista on an ssd at all. all in all, if not for the learning of new stuff on win7, i would have reverted back to vista days ago, as it works better for me. tons of tiny and bigger ui bugs in win7 make it quite annoying to use, compared to the solid and polished vista..

people should get over the hype that is win7 and understand that it does not much different than vista. espencially on an ssd, all "vista performance is bad" statements are 100% untrue.

 

I never said Vista performance is bad, i love my Vista...But the benchmark i linked speaks for itself.

Also, TRIM is FAR from overrated, 30 seconds on google will show you that.

 

trim means, if you have it on from the start, and it gets used all the time, your ssd will be ordered and clean, and all deletes will propagate to the ssd.

fun thing is, if one part doesn't comply (f.e. you boot into some linux disk, or windows repair disk, or what ever that doesn't do trim) and work there with your ssd for a bit, it gets messed up, and that mess up WILL STAY FOR EVER.

what trim does, is make an ordered thing stay ordered. but if you happen to have a chaotic disk, trim won't help AT ALL.

so disks should still stay very good at garbage collecting, as f.e. my intel is. thanks to that, trim is a 100% non-issue for me, as the intel performs just as well with chaotic oses as with trimming oses (actually, my intel can't trim at all ).

and THAT is a good ssd. an ssd that can only run well in a "clean" environment is not a good ssd.

so trim is overrated. 30 seconds on google will show you marketing hype. companies with bad ssd controllers believe in trim, as that will hide their flaws. but it doesn't fix them.

and win7 is no faster than vista on an ssd. at least not on the intel. proof is right below my hands right now. i'm on win7, and i don't see any gain. en contraire, it happens to start quite some of my apps including firefox quite a bit slower than it did on vista.

 

I know all that, but for users with SSD's with crappier controllers (actually, anything with a non-Intel controller will benefit, kudos to Intel for getting it right from the start) will see noticeable improvements.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=13

PCMark Vantage HDD Test New "Used" % Drop
Intel X25-M 29879 23252 22%
JMicron JMF602Bx2 MLC 11613 11283 3%
OCZ Summit 25754 16624 36%
OCZ Vertex 20753 17854 14%
Samsung SLC 17406 12392 29%
Seagate Momentus 5400.6 3525 -
Western Digital VelociRaptor 6313 -

 

yep, and that's why i still say trim sucks and is useless, get your ssds right.

and my ssds have gotten it right both intel and mtrons perform well, some now after one year of neardaily usage with still the first install of the os on them.

 

I'm jealous

I think I'll get an SSD a year into my laptops life, by then the prices will be more reasonable and the capacity will be where i want it. Sucks that they wont be any faster on computers like mine because they already reached the SATA 3 Gbit/s speed limit, but everything else will be improved.