XP Policies for External SATA Drive?

[corkyg]

The normal way to change "Policies" for an external/removable device is right clicking on the hardware and then selecting the Policies tab and checking the one you want - improved performance or quick removal.

I have just added an external SATA drive for data only - and that procedure is grayed out and set for "Performance."

That setting causes the occasional, annoying, "Delayed Write Failed" syndrome. Performaance is not the desired, but turning off the caching that causes that error is desired.

With that option grayed out, is there a Registry hack that can make it happen?

 

[corkyg]

I figured this question would be beyond the ken of most in this forum - but - we'll try one bump.

 

[Jeff7]

What controller is it attached to? I've got a SATA enclosure on my NF7-S Rev2.0, and it always has the write-cache enabled. I used the SATARAID Tools utility from here; Open it, and it one of the tabs there is the option to disable the write cache. You need to do this on each new drive the controller sees, but it should remember the option when it sees a drive it knows.

Granted, your writes will be slow as hell - less than 10MB/sec - but you won't risk data corruption. If you're going to be doing a lot of writing to the disk, you can enable the write cache, then disable it when you're ready to remove the drive. Not as elegant a solution as it would be if Windows would ID the drive as removable, but it does work.

Now then, what SATA controller do you have?

 

[corkyg]

Thanks, Jeff! The controller is on the mobo - a Fast Trak 376 by Promise. Comes on the Asus P4E.

I'm not interested in a lot of speed - it is only used for data and digital photo storage.

I just want to find a way to disable the write cache. For 2 days it has been OK - but now and then it has an epidemic of Delayed Write Failures.

I'll look at your "here." Thanks for the response - so far you are the only one that knows anything about an external SATA drive.

 

[Jeff7]

I guess I'm one of the few who's used one. I've got a Kingwin KF-81-BK mobile rack, with a total of 3 trays/drives. I'm starting a massive collection of MST3K episodes, readying them for DVD, and I wanted a good long-term storage solution. I also figured it'd be good to have some kind of storage other than RAID 5 - sure, RAID 5 has good redundancy in the event of a drive failure, but it's not much good against a power surge. So, a mobile rack sounded good - SATA offered hot swap capabilities.

Also, I can't seem to find a "P4E" motherboard on Asus' site.

 

[corkyg]

My fault - it is a P4PE.

Asus

I went to the SI site and the only thing I could find that seemed to have a utility was the 3124-SATA/RAID Management Utility.ZIP. I unzipped it and installed the program. The only thing it would do was to put a blue icon in the tray - but that did nothing.

So, I uninstalled it. From what I read, it is probably hardware specific for SiliconImage.

What I did was to buy an external Firewire enclosure and a backplane adapter. The latter is simple - a backplane with a female SATA socket that has a SATA cable to the motherboard socket. It simply allowed me to move the SATA data drive out of the case - a little less heat and the external power brick takes the load off of the system power supply.

I will post pics.

OK - here is the finished external config:

SATA

Item 1 is my C/F reader/writer
Items 2 and 3 are duplicate Firewire drives - back ups to the SATA drive (5). The enclosure has two ports - SATA data and power, and an on/off button. The Romtec TRIOS II device (4) is a switch system between 3 internal IDE drives. Unfortunately, they went out of business.

I used to use mobile racks for the IDE drives until I got the Trios II.

I'll keep searching for a generic SATA/RAID utility.