Advanced Hard Drive Performance in Windows 2K3?

[Chem]

Was just using device-manager to disable the floppy drive I took out, and thought I'd check out the properties of my hard drives. While doing so I saw an option that peaked my curiosity.

I attatched a screenshot to show what I'm talking about.

What does this option do? What kind of performance gain will I get from using it? What dangers are involved? Do I look fat in this? Etc...

[strekship]

I wouldn't try it. If your power goes out, or if you need to do an impropor shutdown, you could loose data.

[XtremeMaC]

that's right u will lost data. but i've 2 external drives (hdd & dvd-/+rw) both are on performance and i've a ups

but my write cache was enabled but now its not does anyone know how to enable it forever???

edit: ow well bump sorry i had not seen the last bit of the picture.

wow i don't have that on xp, is that only on w2k3? seems like a nice feature

if its sitting there and u've the option to check it i'd definitely go for it

but i dunno what it does...

here's how mine looks like

its a western digital 120gb 8mb cache with external closure speedzter 3 from caloptic. (when i bought it there wasn't much external stuff avaliable, i'm sure the real external ones that maxtor wd produce are better (i mean the closures are better))

Edited March 26, 2004 by XtremeMaC

[Chem]

So far I've been told that In WinXP and pre-SP3 Win2k, there was a bug that caused write-through flags to be ignored. This could cause possible data loss, in the event of a power failure or whatever.

Microsoft fixed this bug, but in fixing it caused SCSI file copies to not be cached, thus causing slowdown.

IIRC, enabling the advanced performance option in 2003 removes this "fix", so while the odds of data loss are much higher, file copies are cached on SCSI drives.

This makes sense, only my hard drives are IDE, so I dont think it applies?

Hoping someone can clear this up.