So, I notice for my main internal drive I can select 'Enable Write Caching on Disk', at the risk of data loss in a power outage - does anyone do this, and is it worth it? On a side note, is there a way to force windows to allow me to enable 'Optimize for Quick removal' on another drive? It's an external sata drive, and this option is greyed out. Thanks!
Optimized for quick removal is for USB drives. eSATA HDD doesn't really need this as it's fast enough for Windows to just do the whole transfer and not "do it/finish later". Write caching means that the transfer or writes that you do with you data is done very fast for you, but continues the task on the back for you. So if your computer shut-downs right after you transfer a movie file, it may be corrupted. Now, it might seams stupid thing but in reality the transfer is done using a cache so that means not only your transfer is faster but you can access it at the new location without any problem. It's great for laptop with slow hard drives like 5400RPM. For desktop it's less visible, but anything helps.. well helps. But then again if you have a power-surge you may lose or corrupt the file transfer you just performed just a few second before.
Another point is that you can't eject it right after the transfer. Safely removing will either fail or take long, and just ripping it out will corrupt the data.
Um... on a main internal drive, you wouldn't be removing the drive anyway. As Windows explains, the risk is that if power goes out and the drive is has data in its cache buffer that it hasn't written to the drive that the data will be lost... however I've never had that happen to me even when power goes down. Still, if you get power cuts fairly often it's probably better to leave it off. On the other hand, file transfers are a lot faster with caching on.
Thanks guys I rarely get power cuts, so am temped to turn it on, though I don't exactly transfer large files that much, so I could jsut turn it on as required I guess..
It'll be just as useful with small files, I think. I seem to remember seeing a disk benchmark a couple of years back that had disk cache enabled and disabled, and everything from boot times to file transfers were faster with it enabled... ...can I find that benchmark set now, though? No, I can't.
