Is it not possible to enable hdd disk caching when on a RAID card?

[stonecold3169]

Alright, so I've got a WD 120gbSE 8mb cache drive, and I'm trying to install it as a single drive on the HP372 RAID controller on my SOYO kt333 Dragon Ultra Platinum mobo. The drive works fine, and seems to be pretty fast, but sandra and hdtach both tell me that write cacheing is disabled. I checked the drive in device manager, and under policies it has optimization greyed out, and no option for write caching. My buddy has the same drive on a standard IDE port, and he has the option as a little checkmark under optimization.

I've tried multiple drivers, to no avail... is there any way to fix this problem?

Oh, btw, I'm using the raid controller for a single hdd because I have 3 cd-roms in the comp, and it seemed to make the most sense.

Thnks in advance!

 

[Lord Evermore]

Windows sees an external controller as a "SCSI controller" even though it isn't one; this is just due to limitations of IDE drivers and what capabilities the manufacturer can provide on the card, so the controller makers set it up to be seen as a SCSI controller. Since Windows assumes that a SCSI controller will have some limited amount of cache at least, it doesn't allow for the OS to have a write cache enabled.

This shouldn't cause any huge issues. A write cache simply allows the OS to cache a write so that the CPU can work on immediate needs for the user, and then the OS will complete the write when the CPU and drive have a bit of idle time. Needless to say, there's a lot of idle time on most machines.