In summing up, its "Safely Remove Hardware", its "Optimize for performance", its "Write Caching", its "the vibe", its "Mabo"

If you use external USB hard drives, you might not know that Windows XP sp2 (and presumably other versions) enacts a policy on these 'hot' removable devices, which limits their performance by default.

If you open Computer Management, and navigate to Disk Manager, and right click on your removable hdd, select "Properties", then select the "Policies" tab, you will notice the device is "Optimized for quick removal", meaning you do not need to select the Safely Remove Hardware icon before disconnecting it; great for memory keys and ipods, but not great for mass storage devices. Change the setting to "Optimize for performance", and you will effectively enable write caching to the device.

bam!