Caution this is about registrey editing. Just discovered this after buying an external HD for my backups.
So far I had always done it through CDs or network devices.
Starting to back up and ... gosh
only 5Mb/s writting : I was shocked and feeling abused.What was this shit they had sold me !?!? (a Lacie Quadra at that ... not exactly the chepeast stuff)
Furious anger ... start to investigate the damn thing, try a bit of Linux and come through the Synchronous / Asynchronous setting and miracle .... the bandwith springs up to 25Mb/s.
But where is the thing in Windows ? After a bit of investigation, turned out that it is the write cache enable setting in the drive properties. That you cannot touch (disabled) on external HDs.
1 - Last time I had a power failure at home was was ... well, can't even remember,MS bull.... wrote: because if you unplug incorrectly or you have a power failure you have a chance of losing / corrupting data
2 - Like the problem would not affect internal HDs but then it is OK !
3 - If you unplug savagely in the middle of the transfer the chances is the result looks pretty bleak anyway, regardless of an 8 Mb cache, and you are going to start all over again,
4 - If you unplug while the transfer is finished and the data still in cache.
Well at 8Mb cache / 25 Mb/s = 0.25 second, it is a hell of a fast move !!
All in all and after a little further investigation, all you need is this (to be adapted to your own drive serial) :
reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_ST332082&Prod_0AS&Rev_3.AA\8&26635641&0&00D04B751804CE71&0\Device parameters\Disk"
reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_ST332082&Prod_0AS&Rev_3.AA\8&26635641&0&00D04B751804CE71&0\Device parameters\Disk" /v UserWriteCacheSetting /t REG_DWORD /d 0x1 /f
Result transfer rate up from 5 Mb/s to 25 Mb/s
Side benefit the HD heads do not go back and forth uncessarily (while before they would semingly go back to the default position between each file) and it is A LOT QUIETER !!
