Enable Disk Write Caching to improve performance in Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008

 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008
Jan 222009
 

Disk Write Caching is a feature which allows you to increase the performance of your Hard Disk. While this can improve performance, it comes attached with its own risk. If the system or disk loses power then there is every possibility that the data gets corrupted or lost in the event of a power failure. Depecnding upon the criticality of the data and the reliability of the power and power backups and UPS,  enabling or disabling Disk Write Caching should be enabled or disabled.

You can see the System rating for your Disk changes before and after enabling/disabling Disk Write Caching

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, by default enables Disk Write Caching. However, to enable or disable Disk Write Caching,

1. Click Start, right-click Computer and select Properties.

2. In the leftpane, click Device Manager.

3. Expand Disk Drives and right-click on the disk where you need to enable or disable Disk Write Caching and click properties.

4. Click the Policies tab and check “Enable Write Caching on the device” to enable (default). To disable, uncheck the box.

5. To further improve the disk performance (needless to say, higher the risk now),

In Windows 7, check the box “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device”

disk-write-cache

In Windows Server 2008, “Enable Advanced Performance”

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6. Click Apply and OK.

If you now rerun the System Ratng, you should see the disk scrore changed.

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  4 Responses to “Enable Disk Write Caching to improve performance in Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008”

  1. Nathan says:
    February 26, 2009 at 11:46 pm

    I enable “Enable write caching on the disk” for a 160GB Western Digital PATA drive on which Server 2008 standard is installed. I can confirm that it makes a difference in performance by watching the Reliability and Performance monitor before and after the change. Before I enable it, the drive only writes at about 12 Megabytes per second. Ater the change, throughput jumps up to 50+ Megabytes per second so that’s a four-fold increase in performance! My test is the transfer of a ~3 GB file from a drive array that can sustain 200 Megabytes per second read. The problem is the setting won’t stick; every time I reboot the comptuer, the check mark vanishes and performance drops back down to the crappy 12 MB/sec rate. Anyone know how to fix this?

  2. Ahmed says:
    March 20, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    I know all that , but as a surprise my 250GB Maxtor doesn’t show the “Policies” Tab in Hard disk properties of the device manager…any hints ???

  3. kostas says:
    March 29, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    in properties on my hard drive is not show the tab policies and i dont can enable write caching plz hepl me how can enable write caching?????????policies tab i canot find

  4. Write speed between a raid 0 array and a sata II stand alone drive question - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net says:
    August 5, 2010 at 1:50 am

    [...] possibly lead to filesystem corruption. Of course, there may be a way to get partially around it. http://www.windowsreference.com/wind…s-server-2008/ But Windows still seems to favour keeping the queue very low – as close to zero as possible, so [...]

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