PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 56 Avoid the Delayed-Write-Caching Blues

This Windows performance enhancer could make you a real loser, of your data. Make this simple tweak and compute with peace of mind.

In an effort to give us another performance boost, Windows provides the ability to cache (store in memory for later use) data that is to be written to your hard drives, writing the data only when the system is less busy. This feature puts your data at risk for some short period of time and can result in data being lost if the system crashes or the power fails before the data is safely transferred from memory to the disk drive. Write-caching is not a bad thing unless you live where power fluctuates or fails frequently. Admittedly the time window affecting this risk is very short, a second or two at most, but you cannot control when a power glitch will happen in that second or two to cause data loss.

If your PC gets power from an uninterruptible power supply, especially one that can tell Windows that power is failing so it can do a proper shutdown, you probably don't need or want to use this hack.

Write-caching, or delayed writing, is enabled by default in all versions of Windows. We have to take deliberate steps to turn it off.

To remove the risks of delayed-write-caching for Windows 95/98/Me, follow these steps:

To disable delayed-write-caching under Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, follow these steps:

Write-caching does boost your performance, but it is best to use it only if you have a very stable system and are running your PC on an uninterruptible power supply with automatic shutdown of Windows enabled. It's a good idea to enable the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) capabilities in your BIOS [Hack #57] .

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