Cache Writing - Enable or not to enable?

As I understand it, enabling it helps from a speed standpoint and hurts from a data safety standpoint.

So you get to define "better" however you wish--faster or safer; one or the other; not both.

Most people are obsessed with speed and will choose to enable it, even though if the switch had been in the disabled position for years, they probably wouldn't have ever noticed it or complained. It's mostly about benchmarking and obsessing over minor details.

Looking at your HD tests, it seems to make virtually no difference on your drive.

I don't have a clue about the real-world risks of losing or corrupting data. I have never knowingly had data corrupted by enabling the cache, nor do I use a UPS. I have a power failure perhaps once a year.

Plain and simple...you want write caching enabled for best performance. And the best bet is to put a UPS on your computer that way if you have a power outage you won't lose any data that was committed to cache and not yet written to the hard drive. UPS's are cheap these days. $40 to $80 will be more than enough for home use. I've got 4 of them at home and all of my PC's that I use have one.

I recently ran into a nasty performance issue on a high end server at work which didn't have a battery module on the RAID controller. Without that, VMWare would not write cache anything on it's own and performance was abysmal. Adding the battery to the RAID controller memory meant that anything in memory in the event of a power outage would be maintained by the battery. Once that battery was in place the server controller began write caching and performance shot through the roof. Of course, this example doesn't translate perfectly into the home world market ...but the general idea is that it provides performance.