One of the server settings that I always enable when configuring a new instance of SQL is database instant file initialisation

In case you don’t know what this is, it is a setting that can be granted to the service account that the SQL database engine runs under that prevents SQL Server from “zeroing out” new space when a data file is created or expanded.

This improves the performance of CREATE/ALTER DATABASE statements, RESTORE statements and AUTOGROWTH operations. A full detailed article to how and why can be found here.

It’s cool to see that you can now enable this when installing SQL Server: –

I can’t think of any downside to having this enabled (off the top of my head, there’s probably one or two) and it’s good to see that Microsoft know that most people enable it so adding it as an option in the installer is great imho.