Writing cache with sata?

[mikalcarbine257]

I was speeding up my comp's boot speed and analyzing it with bootvis (was able to cut it down 30+ seconds ) and I noticed that under the hard drive section it says Warning, Write Cache Disabled! I did some research on this and found out it may increase hd performance, but I don't know if that is true with sata disks. Can anyone verify any of this? Thx m8

[Gizmo]

Write cache can help or hurt, depending on the application. In most situations, you only have a finite amount of cache to use, and you can either use all of it for reading, or you can use part for read cache and part for write cache. Typically in this scenario, the drive divides the cache in half, using half the cache for read and half the cache for write. Because of this, you may actually lose performance, since the cache being used for writing is no longer available to cache read data.

It has been my experience that you are generally better off to let the drive cache be used for reading, and let your controller do write caching, but only if you have lots of controller cache (like 64 or 128 meg). Further, you do NOT want to enable write caching AT ALL unless you have a UPS or battery backed cache. If you are using write caching and you lose power, and data in the cache is toast.

[mikalcarbine257]

I'll leave it off, thx m8