External hard drive: Optimize for quick removal or performance?

[mkanet]

I have an external 500 GB firewire hard drive with 64K clusters. I have the option to select performance or quick removal (quick removal disables write caching). Does sagetv record better to drives with write caching disabled?

[Rezolution]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I have an external 500 GB firewire hard drive with 64K clusters. I have the option to select performance or quick removal (quick removal disables write caching). Does sagetv record better to drives with write caching disabled?

Anyone have any clue what's better? I have 4 external USB drives and I'm not sure if it's better to use caching or not...

[Rezolution]

Originally Posted by Rezolution

Anyone have any clue what's better? I have 4 external USB drives and I'm not sure if it's better to use caching or not...

Ok then, anyone want to tell me how they have their external drive set up? LoL. Optimized for quick removal or optimized for performance?

[GKusnick]

Do you want to be able to just unplug it without telling Windows to stop it first? If so, choose quick removal. If you don't experience any performance issues as a result, then you don't need to worry about optimizing for performance.

I'm guessing there's not going to be a lot of difference in performance anyway, at least for recording files, which are written strictly sequentially. All of those pages have to be written out eventually, so I don't see what you gain by caching them. (Random-access files are a different story, where caching makes more sense if the same page might be touched many times before it's eventually written out.)