Delayed Write Failure

[Quasmo]

My coworker continues to get delayed write failures, and his computer locks up constantly. We do incredibly memory intensive renderings (after effects, photoshop) and reach very large page files. It helped to move his page file to another drive.

He and I think it's the hard drive. The IT guy here doesn't think the HDD is the issue. How often is a delayed write failure caused by a hard drive not failing?

 

[gsaldivar]

Sounds like you might have a loose connection to the hard drive. Try swapping out the cables connecting the hard drive to the computer - both the power and I/O cable. DWF errors are caused by disconnecting a volume that has cached data that has not yet been written to the drive, such as a fixed volume like a hard drive that has write-caching enabled. It's a serious problem if the drive contains important data, as it can lead to data corruption. You can mitigate these errors temporarily by disabling write-caching on the drive, but you will take a performance hit and not solve the underlying issue. If the errors persist after swapping cables, replace the drive.

Good luck!

 

[StinkyPinky]

I hope your IT guy is sorting it out. As stated these failures will likely result in data corruption if left unfixed. What's he doing about it?

 

[RebateMonger]

Here's some other possibilities (under XP, at least), which are related to paging:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330174

"A delayed write failure may occur if data is corrupted. Data corruption may occur if the Large System Cache feature is enabled for memory usage in Windows XP. If this feature is enabled, the number of page table entries that Windows XP must maintain may be increased, and in extreme cases, may be exhausted. Although this problem does not occur on all systems, the following key factors may cause data corruption:

* System memory that is more than 512 megabytes (1 gigabyte of RAM is common)

* Large NTFS disk volumes and multiple large volumes (60-100 gigabyte hard drives, possibly in RAID arrays)

* AGP graphics with large AGP resource requirements (more than the default AGP aperture)

* Large file transfers. This problem occurs when the computer runs out of system page table entries. When the computer is started, Windows determines the default number of page table entries to assign, based on how much system memory is available."

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's some other possibilities (under XP, at least), which are related to paging:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330174

MS never fixed that bug?