Speed up External Hard Drives

The default setting in Windows 7 disables write caching for external drives. This is done so that you can remove an external drive at any time without data loss. If you are willing to eject your drive each time using Safely Remove Hardware, you can increase the performance of your external hard drives by enabling write caching.




To turn write caching on and activate advanced performance:
1. Click on the Start Button, type dev in the search box, and click Device Manager.
2. Click on the + Next to Disk Drives.
3. Right click on your external hard drive and click Properties.
4. Click the Policies tab and click Optimize for performance

5. If available, check: Enable write caching on the device and Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device.
6. Click OK.
7. Reboot your computer to apply changes.