Is USB/FW disk cache flushed on standby?

[Robert Roland]

I have a couple of external harddisks, one connected to USB and the
other to FireWire. I have a device which can turn off power to these
automatically a few seconds after the PC goes into standby. Is it safe
to do this, or would I risk data corruption if I did?

I'm worried that XP does not flush the write cache to external disks
before it enters standby mode. I can see that there was a problem with
internal LBA disks before SP2
(http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;331958), but
I cannot find any information about external disks.

 

[Guest]

when your computer goes into standby mode the computer does cut power to your
hdds(internal) along with other things. all that uses power at this time is
the primary memory or the RAM. But there is a major risk involved ie data
loss due to power loss. This can be averted if you do have your system
connected to a UPS or such. does the device that cuts power to your external
drive get it back up as soon as your off standby?? other than this is no
reason that i see that should stop you from using this feature.

Hope this helps
yogi