Vista - enable write caching?

[Durzel]

On Vista write caching on SATA hard drives (dont know if this applies to all hard drives) is disabled by default..

You can enable it but there is a very clear warning that by doing "a power outage or equipment failure might result in data loss or corruption". There is another check box below it which allows you to further enhance the performance, at the cost of an even higher risk of data loss on "equipment failure".

Now, I am assuming that this "equipment failure" essentially means BSODs, lockups, etc - since this is ostensibly the same as if the power died anyway. My PC is on a UPS but I'm always on the bleeding edge of performance, and overclock most of my system. Right now I'm torn between thinking what kind of performance improvement this could give, and worrying about "what if the next time I get a BSOD I can't boot Vista?"

Have any of you enabled this? Any feedback you can give?

 

[killer_uk]

It's only recommended to be used when your attached to a UPS, so you should be ok. I don't know much about it, but a quick google came up with:

"If you lose power, or bluescreen during many file operations, it won't be uncommon for the result to be a non-bootable system."

EDIT: This may help:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/04/WindowsConfidential/default.aspx

 

[Durzel]

It's only recommended to be used when your attached to a UPS, so you should be ok. I don't know much about it, but a quick google came up with:

"If you lose power, or bluescreen during many file operations, it won't be uncommon for the result to be a non-bootable system."

EDIT: This may help:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/04/WindowsConfidential/default.aspx

Yeah that's my worry.

My PC is connected to a UPS, but that's never stopped it bluescreening or locking up when I've pushed it to its limits.

 

[NathanE]

Personally I would never enable this unless the RAID controller has a cache and it's own personal battery backup. (i.e. a server system)

 

[Durzel]

Ok thanks, I'll leave it well alone

 

[Tute]

Does anybody know exactly what it does?

 

[NathanE]

It set's the I/O manager into a very aggressive caching mode. Basically all write's to the disk are cached in memory. Then every set interval or when the cache fills up they are flushed and made persistent by actually performing the write on the disk. This can increase performance by an absolute **** load because of reduced disk head movements and so forth. But unfortunately data integrity is sacrificed unless your server (or specifically, it's RAID controller) was designed with it in mind.

The new transactional features of NTFS 6.0 in Vista and Longhorn Server will mean this write caching feature can be enabled a bit more "willy nilly" - but I would still use extreme caution.