R
R. C. White
Hi, John.
I'm resurrecting this old thread to remind those who know and tell those who
don't know about a well-hidden setting that might avoid future such
problems.
In Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc - one of my favorite utilities!), you can
right-click on Disk 5 - or whichever is the Disk # for your removable
device, then click Properties. On the Policies tab, choose whether to
optimize for Quick Removal or for Better Performance. If you choose Quick
Removal, you never need to wait for the "Safe to remove..." signal. You can
"pull the plug" at any time because this disables write caching on that
device.
As you know, John, but others may not, Vista speeds up operation when saving
data to a device by first writing it to a cache in RAM, then, when it has
time, leisurely writing from RAM to the relatively slower device. But if
the plug is pulled before the RAM-to-device write is completed, the data can
be garbled or lost. When we set Policies to optimize for Quick removal,
Vista does not use the cache, but immediately writes the data directly to
the device. Thus, unless we are lightning-quick in pulling the plug,
there's no chance for data loss. This does make writes to the device
slower, but few of us will ever notice the slight difference. The delay
time is usually measured in milliseconds.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
I'm resurrecting this old thread to remind those who know and tell those who
don't know about a well-hidden setting that might avoid future such
problems.
In Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc - one of my favorite utilities!), you can
right-click on Disk 5 - or whichever is the Disk # for your removable
device, then click Properties. On the Policies tab, choose whether to
optimize for Quick Removal or for Better Performance. If you choose Quick
Removal, you never need to wait for the "Safe to remove..." signal. You can
"pull the plug" at any time because this disables write caching on that
device.
As you know, John, but others may not, Vista speeds up operation when saving
data to a device by first writing it to a cache in RAM, then, when it has
time, leisurely writing from RAM to the relatively slower device. But if
the plug is pulled before the RAM-to-device write is completed, the data can
be garbled or lost. When we set Policies to optimize for Quick removal,
Vista does not use the cache, but immediately writes the data directly to
the device. Thus, unless we are lightning-quick in pulling the plug,
there's no chance for data loss. This does make writes to the device
slower, but few of us will ever notice the slight difference. The delay
time is usually measured in milliseconds.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100