How to disable write behind cache

[Tiggerz]

I need to disable the write behind cache on my HD. Its a WD1200JB.. However, in device mananger there is no option and the performance tab is greyed out.

Its this that is stoppin me from going higher in teh overclocking I suspect.

[Agent666]

um your logic seems a bit up the creek without a paddle

ok by overclocking a bit higher you will gain a tiny bit extra in speed
But by disabling the cache on your HDrive you will loose a lot of overall performance since the HD is the major bottleneck in most systems....... trust me on this I disabled the cache on my IBMs and disabled my controllers cache and got like 10-20mb/s writes on a RAID array .. it was horrible... with both caches enabled in the region of 60-70mb/s...


That and the fact that you cant do it on a WD drive..... as far as I am aware because they dont offer any utilities to go with there drives.

... you could try the hitachi/IBM program on there site as I know that works for other brand drives as far as enabling/disabling acostic management goes and might work for disabling cache as well but wouldnt bet on it .... but worth a go I suppose

[Tiggerz]

not quite the two are slightly different.

The WD drive has an 8mb IDE cache which is part of the IDE controller on the drive. I think this is what you are referring too.

I'm talking about the windows drive cache.

What happens is windows using part of your ram to cache writes to the drive. It writes to that memory, then lazily commits the memory to disk.

If you remember the old zip drives. It would tell you it had finished copying the file, but the drive light would continue flashing for a while after. This is the cache being commited.

This type of cache is called a write behind cache. Windows does not use this for removable media.. Only for fixed drives.

What I want to do is turn of the write behind cache, so windows writes directly to the drive. Is supposed to give a significant performance boost.

[Agent666]

ok I am on the same wavelength now....... lol got the wrong end of the paddle.....

various tweaking programs will allow you to control the windows disk caching (cacheman comes to mind)... I have not really seen any that allow you to disable it but your first port of call might be some of the registry tweak sites etc....

BTW I have never heard of disabling it to increase performance at all..... in my opinion disabling it would slow the passage of info to the drive to be written since if the system is busy and cannot give the drive info it has no choice but to wait till it can cos it cannot goto the cache to get it... if that make sense...

would be interesting to see your results at any rate.......

[Antimatter]

In Windows XP, it's under the policies section of the drive properties in device manager.

[Agent666]

Originally posted by Tiggerz
However, in device mananger there is no option and the performance tab is greyed out.

[Antimatter]

Oops. Missed that.
I guess it needs a registry hack then.