Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Thesesettingsareusedbecause,toremovethebaydevice,youmustpressaswitch,which
automaticallyinformsthesystemthataremovalisimminent.Thatinturncausesthe“safe
removal” process to run and automatically flushes all caches.
For external drives, the capabilities can vary. For example, I have one USB external drive
in which, if I check Optimize for Performance (turn Windows caching ON), the Enable
Write Caching on the Disk (hardware write cache ON) box is also automatically checked
but also grayed out, and below it appears a yellow bang with the warning statement
This
device does not allow write caching to be disabled.
I have another USB external
drive that shows no option at all for hardware write caching. Still another external drive
showstheoption,buteverytimeIcheckit,thesettingisautomaticallyclearedafterIclick
OK; in other words, hardware write caching cannot be turned on.
For internal drives, it is almost always recommended that you keep write caching on for
maximum performance. For additional performance on external drives, you might also
want to turn on lazy write (Optimize for Performance) and the hardware write cache (En-
