Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Enable write caching on disk and improve disk performance

I have enabled write caching on my disk and this does have helped improve
disk performance to a significant degree. Now you may ask why ?. WriteCache
is nothing else but implementation of concept of delayed write. As we all
know I/O activities are generally slow and hence if they are synchronous
can significantly reduce the system performance. Hence if system
performance has to be improved we have to reduce I/O activities. Now
practically we can not ask you to change your habits (meaning start typing
like a superman or robot etc.) but we can have a solution. We can control
the frequency of diskwrite by specifying regular intervals. All that needs
to be written between the intervals would be writen in a write buffer which
would be maintained in RAM. This write buffer would be written to the disk
at regular intervals or whenever it gets full. This is a smart concept with
one drawback. There is a chance that you may loose some data in case of
critical power loss or system failure but this is not an issue for me and
should not be to most of the users. Such things become an issue for Mission
Critical Business Servers.
To enable write cache on your disk, go to DEVICE MANAGER. Then select hard
disk in the disk drives and right click on it and select properties. Go to
policies tab and select checkbox which say "Enable write caching on the
disk". Close out everything and you are done.

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