Comment Feed for Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive

AndyC — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:49:28 GMT

Of course there is a setting. However some, slightly naughty, drivers completely ignore it and cache the write anyway so that they always look fast in benchmarks.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive

Herbie Smith — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:36:21 GMT

Isn't there a setting somewhere for preventing write-caching? It might be that XP is caching the write to the USB drive (so when it says it has finished, it's lying!). I know that in Vista you can switch this off (of course I can't remember wheren this setting is ...)

Herbie

Re: Re: Re: Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive

AndyC — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:33:16 GMT

May be a driver issue, it's possible the XP driver is taking a shortcut and just blanking the FAT wheras the Vista one is doing a full rewrite for some reason.

Re: Re: Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive

Raghavendra_Mudugal — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:49:05 GMT

I tried it in XP again... its just does in a flash and message box appears... format completed. If i format the formatted pen drive on Vista.. its sames... 15+

sequential write performance.... will be slow if the drive contains data so it goes to each location and does... but the drive is empty contains not even a single byte... so basically FAT is empty.

Re: Vista 64Bit HP(Home Premium) - Formatting a 8GB pen drive

JonathonW — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:39:45 GMT

Are you sure you did a full format in XP? A full format has to zero every byte on the drive; there's no way that happened in 3 seconds (flash drive sequential write performance isn't that good).