Write caching

[Guest Lil' Dave]

I have 3 onboard hard drives. 1 is an old scsi drive. 2 others are

identical SATAs. SATA is remapped to ide here for bootability (older SATA).

 

Under device manager, selecting any of the hard drives, policies, write

caching is enabled under write caching and removal, optimize for

performance. XP does this by default, none are removable hard drives.

 

Noticed there's a slight performance loss when write caching is not enabled.

But, in one 3rd party application use, while its READING the XP partition

image of one of the SATA hard drives image results on another hard drive, a

verification error may occur from time to time. When write caching is

disabled on the SATA drive with the source XP partition, this never occurs.

This is when the target hard drive partition location for that image file is

located on a removable ide hard drive connected to a Promise 133 TX2

controller. This hard drive has no option for quick removal etc. When I

use a firewire connected hard drive, even using the same hard drive in that

enclosure, this never happens. Just bit slower overall doing imaging to the

firewire drive.

 

Am baffled. Don't see the association of write caching enabled on a source

hard drive (imaging is reading that drive) causing the problem. Yet, never

occurs when using the firewire drive as target. This started happening

around SP2 install, foggy not sure exactly. XP HE w/SP2 and all critical

updates since. No IE7.

Dave