I'm not the famous DougH but I thought I'd offer my 2-cents worth...

Yes, write caching (aka write behind cahcing) should ALWAYS be turned OFF in any HD setup, even RAID, UNLESS it has a controller specifically designed and capable, with appropriate intelligence in its controller/driver/etc to correctly handle a sudden power loss situation. Such controllers are very rare at this time, though they do exist and cost significant extra $$$ I believe.

I would bet that the write caching at the file servers is already turned off. Not that it would have come setup that way, but rather that people who maintain these things for a living know this to be the case.

My *personal* opinion is that write caching on a local drive can still cause problems, even during regular processing and without a sudden power failure. I had two illogical experiences with errors involving the cache (one with Word and one with a VFP record) and neither has recurred in about 2 years since turning it off.

good luck


>Universal Thread # 825413 Message ID 826511
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>I realize that the original message to which I am responding is from September, 2003, so if bells don't go ringing, I won't be surprised.
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>In the message to which this is a reply, Doug made a quote "We always tell our users to turn write caching off".
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>Where I am working on contract, we are having a problem which appears to be connected in some way to a "corrupt" index. When set to a particular tag, even browse will not allow getting past a record, we call it "the" record, since it is the last transaction the user sees as the machine locks up, trying to retrieve the next record in the index order.
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>In researching the problem, your suggestion came the closest to a potential answer that we have found to date. The problem with the potential answer is that we do not know how to turn off write caching for a network volume.
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>KB # Q259716 walks us through "Enabling or Disabling the Disk Write Caching". In doing this at a work station ( personal computer ), we only see the local hard disks. This is not where our data resides.
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>1) Are you suggesting that users turn off write caching on their Windows 2000 / 2003 servers ?
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>2) Do you have any further evidence to present to the customer IT staff, should we approach them with a suggestion to touch "their" server?
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>Thanks in advance for any help you can provide with this problem.