Hi.

Does anyone know how to turn off write caching on optical drives (specifically a DVD-RAM drive) in XP SP 3?

It's driving me nuts: DVD-RAM support under windows is absolutely pathetic, and only a very small subset of possible drives actually work. There are loads of drives that list DVD-RAM write support in the specifications, but none of them with the exception of panasonic ones have drivers! And of course, no-one stocks panasonic drives. At all.

The next best solution is a pioneer drive (DVR112 seems to be the most reliable one) and use a patched panasonic driver with it to enable proper UDF support. XP supports, sort of, DVD-RAM using fat 32, but of course that doesn't work if you want to write one huge file completely filling the disk. It took me quite a long time to find out the correct combination, but it works very well in the end.

However, one machine, for reasons too complicated to go into here, has a sony optiarc sata drive in it. This also uses the patched driver, and mostly works. But, around 1 time in 10, when writing to the disk it will slow down and eventually fail. No idea why really. It then locks the drive, and spits out loads of "delayed write failed" messages, one every 10 seconds or so, forcing you in the end to reboot the machine to clear the error.

I can't find any real information on the web about solving this, as I seem to be the only person in the world actually USING DVD-RAM under windows Wheee, lucky me. But it occurred to me that perhaps turning off the write caching would possibly help, or at least allow the machine to be used without rebooting when it dies. I can't find out any way of doing this for an optical drive, though.

Any ideas?

pca

The only time I ever got the "Delayed Write Failed" messages in Windows was when there was a hardware problem with the disk drive.

I don't know how to get rid of the messages or turn off write caching (have you tried going into the device manager? There's a write-caching checkbox for hard disks, perhaps there's one for optical drives), but I think the root of the problem is that it's simply a bad drive and needs to be replaced.

I'm pretty sure the hardware is OK. It works perfectly as a DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drive, and has never given any sort of problems EXCEPT when writing DVD-RAM disks. It's also only a few months old. I have come across a number of problem reports from people in the same sort of situation, but no resolution to it. It seems to stem from the point that windows support for DVD-RAM sucks arse, and only pioneer and panasonic drives seem to work.

I can't find any way of turning off write caching in the device manager. It was the first place I looked.

pca

Wouldn't it be in the same policies tab as for a hard drive?
(Yet for my cd drive that tab is absent.)

Maybe you could toggle that for a hard drive, see what registry changes occur (I'm sure there's a registry watcher over at SysInternals), and then try to perform that registry change manually on the DVD-RAM?

Did you see this on club.cdfreaks.com

Seems to say that the XP "Enable CD recording on this drive" must be unchecked.