Hard Disk

Your hard disk is more than just a storage device; it's a friend. It holds your operating system, keeps your personal data intact, and supplements your system's memory. The speed and health of your hard disk is one of the most important factors in your computer's performance, not to mention its reliability and security. Yet it's also the one component that requires the most attention and often is the most neglected.

The following topics all deal with different aspects of your hard disk and how you can get Windows to use it most effectively. Later in this section, you'll find tips on upgrading and repartitioning your hard disk, to allow you to keep your disk and its data in tip-top shape.

A Quick Performance Hack

There's a nearly hidden option that's turned off by default in Windows 7. It can increase hard disk performance, but in doing so, may also increase the odds of data loss.

Open Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) and expand the Disk drives branch. Right-click your hard disk, select Properties, and choose the Policies tab.

By default, the Enable write caching on the device option is turned on. But the other option, Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device, is unchecked.

Both options here allow Windows to wait until a period of low activity before writing unsaved data to the drive, which improves drive performance considerably. In either case, you can lose data if the power is cut to the drive before that data is written. To help quell data loss, Windows periodically instructs the drive to save queued data whether there's a lull in the activity or not; this is called "write-cache buffer flushing." The second option disables this feature, which can further improve performance, but clearly at some risk.

Microsoft recommends using the Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device feature only for drives that have separate power supplies. But since separate power supplies will lose power just like the one in your PC, that recommendation makes little sense. Instead, you probably should only use the second option if your PC is protected by an uninterruptable power supply (UPS), which can supply power to your PC even after the power goes out or your laptop battery dies.