Is disk caching necessarry? Defragmentation

burnttoastnice · July 10, 2015

After updating my laptop to 8.1, I was absolutely horrified at the boot times. What was once 10 seconds to desktop was now about 30 seconds to desktop. I opened Disk Defragmenter and realised my hard drive was 35% fragmented, so I left it running for a couple hours. HDD cooling setup shown below - I'm really paranoid about disk drive failure even though it's never happened to me yet. Fan is taped to a hard drive so it doesn't vibrate off my desk. Cardboard underneath my laptop is filled with polystyrene to dampen the vibrations.

I also left a screen running showing the HDD temperature, as well as task manager showing the total throughput speed. It was horrible. 1MB/s peak.

After leaving it running for a few hours, I went to check on it and it had frozen. I then remembered that I had actually disabled drive caching in Disk Management. I went and turned it back on, and the defrag speed ramped up to roughly 30MB/s.

The thing is, when caching was disabled, I never really noticed any performance differences in day-to-day use.

My main worry about caching however is data loss. In the past, I've experienced data loss in almost every way. I even had a USB wipe itself clean, as in new-volume no-data-recovery-tools-will-help kind of clean. I also recently discarded an ancient motherboard from 03 which I was using for 24/7 backups when I realised it was killing and write-protecting my USB drives, and on one occasion I think it even damaged a USB flash drive controller - device wouldn't initialise after copying a file.

Back to the topic though. Does anyone think that disk caching is absolutely necessary?

terrytek · July 10, 2015

Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. it depends on the situation.

BTW, how did you get those minimize/maximize/close buttons? I like that.

burnttoastnice · July 10, 2015

Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. it depends on the situation.

BTW, how did you get those minimize/maximize/close buttons? I like that.

Uxpatcher theme is called Summit

Kodiack · July 10, 2015

For non-removable drives, write caching alone should rarely result in data corruption, and if it does, it should only affect what's in cache at the time. The option for better performance should be utilised for all permanent, internal storage drives. The option for write caching should also be on for the best performance, but it's probably best to keep its child option (disabling the write-cache buffer) unused.

If you're this concerned about write caching, then you're heavily concerned about your data in general. It sounds like you had/have an automated backup, and I recommend putting it through a few test runs and ensuring it's in proper working order. Bad things can happen. You can safeguard all you want, but when (not if) the day comes, you'll be happy that your backup was there to save your rear. Backups have saved me and my clients countless times.