Romex Software Forum

I sit with my laptop in a quiet office. Years ago, I had an old laptop with a hard drive that clicked like a bitch. I hated it. So I'm sensitive.

[edit] Issue fixed with quietHDD [end edit]

My laptop now sits here (mostly) silently. However, with FancyCache write-deferred, it clicks exactly with on time with the latency. I had 10 second latency, and it drove me nuts. I turned if off.

This raises a question about the write latency. Does it always wait for the entire latency before writing? Or will it attempt to flush the cache early if the hard drive is otherwise idle?

Another good question: when the latency expires for a piece of data, and that data is written, does it also flush the remainder of the cache (which may contain unexpired data)?

Sorry for the late reply.

This issue may be related to the defer-write. You may try it without Defer-Write enabled. We also will improve it in next version.

swmspam wrote:This raises a question about the write latency. Does it always wait for the entire latency before writing? Or will it attempt to flush the cache early if the hard drive is otherwise idle?

Currently FancyCache basically follow the latency time to flush data.

There are many reports of Hitachi drives being noisy due to aggressive head parking. Some forums refer to this as the "Dell torture device". I'm still looking for a solution. Looking at SMART data, I can see my Hitachi has already used 17,000 Load Cycle Count out of 600,000 - or about 1,000 a day.

It's a known Hard Disk power management problem. Try to disable HD APM and everything should be fine.. to do so, download (quietHDD - http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/) and set APM values to 255..

I tried the Hitachi Feature Tool to disable APM, but apparently, either the Dell BIOS or Windows 7 overrides my manual changes and resets the value. quietHDD is working wonders now.