What is disk write caching and should i enable it?

[Ph33zy]

I currently have a WD 120JB and was wondering if i should enable disk write caching. What exactly is it and i can't seem to find the option of enabling it in xp after i installed the intel aplication accelerater prog...

 

[bacillus]

definitely enable it for best performance.
look in device manager under disk drives/your hdd>policies.

 

[splice]

MS Support page on Disk WC

Disk write caching is a staging area when swapped pages can exist while the HDD is not available for writes. It also allows for better write performace by combining multiple disk writes into one burst write.

 

[BFG10K]

Basically it allows Windows to cache data in the RAM that is going out to the HD and waiting for idle disk times before actually writing the data to the disk. This speeds up disk I/O but it increases the chance of data corruption if the system is not properly shut down.

If your system is unstable, don't enable this setting until you make it stable.