A few weeks ago, I purchased an external eSATA drive and have been transferring a large amount of data to it, as it will now be my primary backup device. After having the drive for less then a day, I immediately started getting notifications in XP of "delayed write failed" after I have turned the drive off.
After some googling appears to have to do with write caching on the drive. Since the system recognizes them as internal disks and not removable storage, it's using write caching on them for a performance boost. I don't have the "safely remove" option for these drives, so the only way I can ensure that I'm not encountering data loss is to shut down the system before I shut off the external drive, forcing the cache to be written immediately. No biggie, lesson learned. I recreated all the data on the drive to ensure it was intact and went about my business.
Then I found out that I could selectively disable write caching for drives via the Policies tab of the properties of the specific drive in device manager. I thought this was the fix and that I no longer need to shut down my system to flush the cache, but I quickly found out that Windows re-enables write caching on the drive each time I reboot. I became aware of this when, after I thought I had disabled write caching, I began getting "delayed write failed" messages again... a FULL 7 HOURS after I shut off my external drive.
How delaying data writes for 7 hours is considered a performance increase is beyond me, but I'm more concerned with the fact that I can't keep the write cache disabled. I find myself having to toggle that option every time I use the external drive, and it's becoming a pain in my a** at this point.
Any ideas how to keep that disabled? Supposedly there is a dskcache.exe utility which would allow me to do this via command line (meaning I could script it on startup), but good luck finding it. The Microsoft support KB article entitled "Obtaining dskcache.exe ..." doesn't even link to it anymore. I also can't find any references to it in the registry.
Thanks in advance.
After some googling appears to have to do with write caching on the drive. Since the system recognizes them as internal disks and not removable storage, it's using write caching on them for a performance boost. I don't have the "safely remove" option for these drives, so the only way I can ensure that I'm not encountering data loss is to shut down the system before I shut off the external drive, forcing the cache to be written immediately. No biggie, lesson learned. I recreated all the data on the drive to ensure it was intact and went about my business.
Then I found out that I could selectively disable write caching for drives via the Policies tab of the properties of the specific drive in device manager. I thought this was the fix and that I no longer need to shut down my system to flush the cache, but I quickly found out that Windows re-enables write caching on the drive each time I reboot. I became aware of this when, after I thought I had disabled write caching, I began getting "delayed write failed" messages again... a FULL 7 HOURS after I shut off my external drive.
How delaying data writes for 7 hours is considered a performance increase is beyond me, but I'm more concerned with the fact that I can't keep the write cache disabled. I find myself having to toggle that option every time I use the external drive, and it's becoming a pain in my a** at this point.
Any ideas how to keep that disabled? Supposedly there is a dskcache.exe utility which would allow me to do this via command line (meaning I could script it on startup), but good luck finding it. The Microsoft support KB article entitled "Obtaining dskcache.exe ..." doesn't even link to it anymore. I also can't find any references to it in the registry.
Thanks in advance.