How do I squeeze the most performance out of my SATA drive in Windows Vista

If you want better performance of your SATA hard drives, simply enable write caching. Be careful! By enabling write caching, you could experience a loss of data or corruption if the machine powers off incorrectly.

Follow these steps to enable write caching. 

1. Click the Windows Vista Start Orb and type device manager in the Instant Search field.
2. Expand Disk Drives and right-click on your SATA drive and choose Properties (Figure A.)
3. Check Enable Advanced Performance from the Policies tab. (Figure B.)

Figure A

Figure B.