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Hard Drives Feel Like Not Caching

July 13th, 2012 - 08:29 pm ET by W | Report spam
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I have a Windows XP installation on a Dell Precision workstation where the
drives apparently have no cache at all in the OS. There is extremely heavy
disk access on all operations and it doesn't feel like the OS has cached any
of the disk into memory. What are the options I need to check to help
understand if some default caching operations have been disabled for the
drive?

Drive is a RAID pair of 160GB Seagate SATA drives. Certainly they are not
speedsters, but we have other computers with the same hardware and those
perform much better.

W
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#1 JJ
July 14th, 2012 - 02:10 pm ET | Report spam
"W" wrote:

I have a Windows XP installation on a Dell Precision workstation
where the drives apparently have no cache at all in the OS.
There is extremely heavy disk access on all operations and it
doesn't feel like the OS has cached any of the disk into memory.
What are the options I need to check to help understand if
some default caching operations have been disabled for the
drive?

Drive is a RAID pair of 160GB Seagate SATA drives. Certainly
they are not speedsters, but we have other computers with the
same hardware and those perform much better.



Read caching is always enabled for all drives.

For write caching, it's disabled for USB based external drives.
To check it:
Open Device Manager and expand the "Disk drives" tree.
Double-click the harddisk and go to "Policies" tab.
Make sure the "Enable write caching on the disk" is enabled.

Also check the Event Viewer and look for warning/error events
regarding disk faults in case of faulty drive.
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#2 W
July 14th, 2012 - 03:10 pm ET | Report spam
"JJ" wrote in message
news:
"W" wrote:

> I have a Windows XP installation on a Dell Precision workstation
> where the drives apparently have no cache at all in the OS.
> There is extremely heavy disk access on all operations and it
> doesn't feel like the OS has cached any of the disk into memory.
> What are the options I need to check to help understand if
> some default caching operations have been disabled for the
> drive?
>
> Drive is a RAID pair of 160GB Seagate SATA drives. Certainly
> they are not speedsters, but we have other computers with the
> same hardware and those perform much better.

Read caching is always enabled for all drives.

For write caching, it's disabled for USB based external drives.
To check it:
Open Device Manager and expand the "Disk drives" tree.
Double-click the harddisk and go to "Policies" tab.
Make sure the "Enable write caching on the disk" is enabled.

Also check the Event Viewer and look for warning/error events
regarding disk faults in case of faulty drive.



For the boot volume C:, the "Enable write caching" option is selected by
default, and it is also greyed out so I cannot select or deselect it or any
sub-options.

I went ahead and used the Intel software RAID management application and I
enabled Write Cache on the RAID volume inside that tool. It doesn't appear
to change the result. The system is incredibly I/O intensive any time any
application is started.

W
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#3 Good Guy
July 14th, 2012 - 08:20 pm ET | Report spam
On 14/07/2012 01:29, W wrote:
I have a Windows XP installation on a Dell Precision workstation where the
drives apparently have no cache at all in the OS. There is extremely heavy
disk access on all operations and it doesn't feel like the OS has cached any
of the disk into memory. What are the options I need to check to help
understand if some default caching operations have been disabled for the
drive?

Drive is a RAID pair of 160GB Seagate SATA drives. Certainly they are not
speedsters, but we have other computers with the same hardware and those
perform much better.





Apart from HD caching you should also look at Windows Virtual Memory
settings. I don't think HD caching is an issue here. I suggest look at
this Microsoft article and follow it line by line and see if it has
improved at all on your system:

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417>

Good luck.


Good Guy
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