HGST Drives & Write caching

[DarskX]

Hi,

I recently brought some HGST 4tb drives as they have had great reviews online, however I noticed while running them with 'write caching on this device' {on by default in win10}, that it would cause the drives to show 'unsafe shutdown count' in HD Tune Pro. I normally wouldnt have been worried by this, but it was happening with every reboot/shutdown. The drives had gone from 100/100 for current/worst down to 99/98 , & were showing unsafe shutdown counts in the thousands.

This has never happened with any of my WD Black drives! I was wondering has anyone else noticed this issue with HGST drives, why does write caching cause this to be a thing only on these drives?

Thanks guys for any help/info.

Darsk

[_I_]

that was a problem with slower hdds
it would shut down faster than the drive would write the cache to the disc

updating drivers should fix it

[DarskX]

_I_님이 먼저 게시:

that was a problem with slower hdds
it would shut down faster than the drive would write the cache to the disc

updating drivers should fix it

Thanks for reply.

I have all latest storage and chipset drivers for my motherboard.

The drives run at 7200 RPM, with 64MB cache so I dont think that is an issue.

With Write caching turned off, it hasnt decreased performance by a great deal either, just find this strange. I even have some older slower HGST drives that dont have this issue!

[Mid-Forever]

Check for drive *firmware* updates?
..."check for firmware updates?" never used to be a question until recently with SSD's and these very large drives.

For a home user, write caching is unnecessary anyhow, so just leave it off.
Write caching is basically telling your hard that it's okay to lie. =P
Not saying a large buffer isn't useful on HDD's, it's great for speeding up reads.
(Edit: "great" is an overstatement, I should have said "can be helpful a small percentage of time...")


To "blah blah blah" for a moment, as if someone asked (but no one did):
Home users just don't write enough to need write caching (and SSD's don't even factor into the equation yet).
Write caching is only truly useful in server/database environments, where a million bits of data can be written every few seconds continuously. *Even then* it's almost too risky, and many different contingency plans are put in place, including (but not limited to) back up power supplies, WAL, the write-thruough flag.
And/or *on disk* write caching is sidestepped completely with battery backed cache controllers and other such solutions.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

What Motherboard you have?
What SATA Mode do you have applied in BIOS?
You should be using some sort of AHCI or RAID. For normal single drives, use AHCI mode for all the SATA. But also ensure proper drivers are installed. Win10 has all that already for Intel-based configs. But for AMD Chipsets, you need to get those from AMD.com > go to the latest GPU Driver download page > then click Optional tab there to find the Motherboard Chipset Drivers, which covers all general AMD chipsets for Athlon64, Phenom, FX, and APUs (basically any chipset by AMD that uses AM2/AM3/FM1/FM2; the AMD chipset drivers includes things native to that chipset aside from NB & SB; such as AMD USB 3.0 as well as AMD SATA. Now you have also have extra SATA & USB 3.0; which may be a different chipset brand. So watch for that, look on your Motherboard's Model page for more details.

If the Motherboard happens to be NVIDIA nForce, those are old and generally slow; not support under Win10. And not good when comes to SSD compatibility either. Avoid any of those.

[_I_]

drive caching speeds up writes not reads

it can read as fast as the disc is spinning
when writing it will buffer to the cache, then write to the disc when not being asked to read

[Mid-Forever]

_I_님이 먼저 게시:

drive caching speeds up writes not reads

Pre-fetch?

Or am I half asleep and confusing myself re:page cache vs disk buffer...
...I don't think so.

[_I_]

prefetch is an os feature not drive

[Mid-Forever]

_I_님이 먼저 게시:

prefetch is an os feature not drive

Sorry, didn't mean the os feature, meant the verb "pre-fetch".
I do admit it's not as useful as I made it out to be, but disk buffer size can have an effect on reads...just that "great" was an overstatement.
Let me find a good article...I'm too tired, can't find an interesting one.

Suffice to say, that the disk buffer will prefetch information from recent/neighboring blocks (read-ahead/read-behind...had to look up the technical term, totally forgot, heh) along with as much frequently used data it can hold (not much, gets flushed pretty quick) in case it is requested. But, again admittedly, that's more by happy accident than anything else.

Also, that the info requested can be read without waiting for any information to be written (that is happily sitting in the disk buffer waiting it's turn), along with command queuing (one way or another, and which are also stored in the disk buffer, by the way), helps read speeds.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well you can't change/adjust the buffer size; that buffer is based on the onboard RAM in the HDD; most newer models have 32MB or 64MB of onboard cache. But that alone is not your buffer, the SATA and Chipset handle a larger portion of this overall buffering, ultimately controlled by SATA Mode, Driver, and your actual OS.