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