For the write caching experts

essenbe said:

My only question is (and this is not meant to be sarcastic) If in practical use, you can tell no difference, what difference does it really make. Mine is on and my WEI is 7.7 . I'm not sure I can improve on that.

Look at it as an academic exercise - most of those do not yield anything.

whs said:

essenbe said:

My only question is (and this is not meant to be sarcastic) If in practical use, you can tell no difference, what difference does it really make. Mine is on and my WEI is 7.7 . I'm not sure I can improve on that.

Look at it as an academic exercise - most of those do not yield anything.

No essenbe, nothing you can "adjust" will raise your disks WEI from 7.7 to 7.8 or 7.9.
BUT, it still, it is important to try to understand all the factors that influence performance as whs suggests - it is very much an academic exercise as well as an intellectual one :):):)

whs said:

"flush write cache buffer" option turned on and off.

Dumb question - How do you do that?

PS: my experience with the OCZ technicians was pretty good. Though that was 2 years ago. They were persons of few words though.

Hi whs - get to device manager and expand disk drives - find the drive you are interested in, click on it to highlight - once highlighted, right click and then select "Properties". From there, click on the "Policies" tab - then you can turn on/off write caching for the drive you have chosen.

I am not as technically astute as you, so I cannot indulge in an acedemic exercise on this subject. My only knowledge of caching is that in a worse case if a power outage were to occur during a write operation, without cashing your data would become corrupted. I am sure ther are other reasons also. But, with an SSD which is only an OS drive, according to Microsoft reads outnumber writes by 40:1. and something like 80% of writes are 4kb or less. It would seem that an SSD is fast enough to write 4kb in an extremely short time as in ms. And due to the fact that writes are a quite infrequent, is write caching necessary? I am sure that there are many more implications of write caching, but the last sentence of Happyman's last post leaves me out of the discussion. My write caching is turned on. At least it's on when my computer is running. My MB is RMA'd right now.

thehappyman said:

whs said:

"flush write cache buffer" option turned on and off.

Dumb question - How do you do that?

PS: my experience with the OCZ technicians was pretty good. Though that was 2 years ago. They were persons of few words though.

Hi whs - get to device manager and expand disk drives - find the drive you are interested in, click on it to highlight - once highlighted, right click and then select "Properties". From there, click on the "Policies" tab - then you can turn on/off write caching for the drive you have chosen.

LOL - thanks, but that I know of course. I thought there was a setting to enable the buffer in the SSD controller. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

PS: essenbe, you are too modest

whs said:

thehappyman said:

whs said:

Dumb question - How do you do that?

PS: my experience with the OCZ technicians was pretty good. Though that was 2 years ago. They were persons of few words though.

Hi whs - get to device manager and expand disk drives - find the drive you are interested in, click on it to highlight - once highlighted, right click and then select "Properties". From there, click on the "Policies" tab - then you can turn on/off write caching for the drive you have chosen.

LOL - thanks, but that I know of course. I thought there was a setting to enable the buffer in the SSD controller. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Once you get to the "Write Caching" tab, you can turn On/Off the "Flush Write Buffer" option from the same screen as shown below - Read Both Options Carefully

No, no way to enable/disable buffering in the SSD from your desktop

[QUOTE
LOL - thanks, but that I know of course. I thought there was a setting to enable the buffer in the SSD controller. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
[/QUOTE]

WHS, maybe that is what the guy on the OCZ forum meant when he said that you had to leave it off for 24 hrs and restart 10-12 times for it to be noticeable.

WHS, maybe that is what the guy on the OCZ forum meant when he said that you had to leave it off for 24 hrs and restart 10-12 times for it to be noticeable

As we have discussed earlier, I do not think he knew what he was talking about. He must have meant the PC of Fred Flintstone.

There are a lot of weird types on the OCZ forum. But some of their senior people are useful. You have to apply a lot of judgement.

WHS, I have applied good judgment. I don't go there anymore.

thehappyman said:

But in the above Winsat tests was the Write Cache Buffer Flushing turned "On" or "Off"

In both tests, the Buffer Flushing was turned OFF (disabled).