Lex van der Horst wrote at MSTN :
Lots of useful Windows Vista tips are now starting to materialize. A new one that I've just implemented on my external Lacie USB Hard Drive is to enable Write Caching, which is turned off by default. By enabling Write Caching you can significantly speedup external Hard Drives in Windows Vista.
To enable Write Caching for external drives in Windows Vista do the following:
- In the Start Menu type "Device Manager"
- Under Disk Drives find your External Drive
- Right-click on it and select "Properties"
- Go to the Policies tab and check "Optimize for performance"
- Click OK and reboot
One final word of warning. If you want to disconnect or turn the drive off yo should use the "Safely Disconnect Hardware" option in the taskbar, to make sure that you don't lose any data.