Disk Write Caching won't stay Enabled after System Restart

Dear Forum Users,

I have two HDs in my system:

1. WD Caviar Blue 500GB (OS Drive)
2. WD Caviar Green 1TB

I've read that enabling write-caching may speed up drive performance. I checked on my 1TB drive, it was already enabled. On my 500GB drive though it was disabled.

So I then decided to enable write-caching on my 500GB drive. I proceeded to do so without any apparent problems. However after doing a system restart I saw that it went back to being disabled again.

I've tried this several times already, same thing each time!

Enable write caching :ar: restart :ar: write caching disabled again.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening? How to fix this?

Thanks!!

quanzaboy

Does no one have any Idea?? =\

Any replies at all please?

Anyone?

No one at all?

Hello?

This setting is set on the drive when you click that setting in Windows, but the drive itself is supposed to save this setting (not just Windows). Windows will honor the setting the drive gives when queried on boot for caching, so if it's getting reset, it's either a driver issue or a drive issue. Given you have two drives and one of them works (and the other doesn't) for this setting, and they're both going to be using the same Windows driver, the likelihood this is a driver issue goes away. That leaves the disk or Windows, and since Windows only honors this setting in the driver if the drive responds that it supports this on boot, that would basically mean it's a hardware problem in the drive itself.

cluberti said:

This setting is set on the drive when you click that setting in Windows, but the drive itself is supposed to save this setting (not just Windows). Windows will honor the setting the drive gives when queried on boot for caching, so if it's getting reset, it's either a driver issue or a drive issue. Given you have two drives and one of them works (and the other doesn't) for this setting, and they're both going to be using the same Windows driver, the likelihood this is a driver issue goes away. That leaves the disk or Windows, and since Windows only honors this setting in the driver if the drive responds that it supports this on boot, that would basically mean it's a hardware problem in the drive itself.

Click to expand...

Finally! Someone shedding some light on this issue! Thank you very much for your reply cluberti!!

The question now however is what am I supposed to do? Replace the drive?

I tried posting about this issue on the official WD forums on their site, but it's been several days already with no reply what so ever.

Is my drive physically defective or is there something that can be done to fix this?

Any suggestions/thought will be highly appreciated!!

Thanks!

You would be advised to contact WD support in some official capacity (email, phone, internet) to see if they can comment or have tools to check this. However, replacement might be the best option if the drive is older than 3 years, in my opinion.

cluberti said:

You would be advised to contact WD support in some official capacity (email, phone, internet) to see if they can comment or have tools to check this. However, replacement might be the best option if the drive is older than 3 years, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice cluberti! The drive is brand new, less than 6 months old! I got it when I bought my new (current) computer. I'll definitely e-mail WD support about this see what they have to say.

Hopefully I won't have to replace the drive altogether!

Thanks again!

Hi, let me tell you that I am searching for the same solution, for what I´ve found until now I can tell:

- The cache parameter is not persistant on the bootable drive only. Microsoft wrote about this but they said it only affected Windows 2000 systems.
- Its not drive related, all my customers servers running Windows 2003, 2008 and SBS are having exactly the same problem.
- If you do some benchmarks on the hard drive before and after enabling cache, you will notice a HUGE performance difference.

What I´ve read about activating the write cache parameter is that you must be sure the system which gets this enabled is connected to an UPS system to avoid any data loss.

I´ve noticed this is not happening on Windows 7 systems but yes on all servers systems I described before (2003, 2008 and SBS).

Does anyone knows how to make the write cache enabled parameter persistent after restarting?

Thanks in advance!