AMD 7-series disk performance utility?

[Spyder22446688]

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_chipset.aspx

AMD offers a 7-Series Chipset Disk Performance Utility. What the heck does it do?

When you try to install the driver, you get the following warning:

Enable Advanced Hard Disk Performance
Recommended only for disks with a backup power supply. This setting further improves disk performance, but it also increased the risk of data loss if the disk loses power.

When you accept the warning and click Yes, the .exe just closes. No apparent installation, no control panel, nothing!

Does anybody have an idea what the utility does, how to tell if it works, and/or how to remove it?

[SuperSpy]

It probably just changes a registry setting that enables some sort of agressive write cache.

[Spyder22446688]

It probably just changes a registry setting that enables some sort of agressive write cache.

Yeah, that was my guess, or something to do with NCQ. However, it's infuriating to me that there is no documentation on the web, in a readme, or in the program itself that describes what it does.

[Flying Fox]

It probably just changes a registry setting that enables some sort of agressive write cache.

Yeah, that was my guess, or something to do with NCQ. However, it's infuriating to me that there is no documentation on the web, in a readme, or in the program itself that describes what it does.

NCQ has nothing to do with needing a UPS.

[GeForce6200]

Wonder if it is the same as Vista's advanced performance option. Looks to be about same. vista says "Recommended only for disks with a backup power supply. this setting improves disk performance, but increases chance of data loss if power outage. I wonder

[just brew it!]

It probably just changes a registry setting that enables some sort of agressive write cache.

Yeah, that was my guess, or something to do with NCQ. However, it's infuriating to me that there is no documentation on the web, in a readme, or in the program itself that describes what it does.

NCQ has nothing to do with needing a UPS.

Well... it is conceivable that allowing the drive to service requests out-of-order (which is what NCQ does) could increase the window for data corruption or loss in the event of a power interruption. Even journaling file systems like NTFS (and EXT3 on Linux) make assumptions about the order in which write operations are committed to the physical media. Anything that messes with that order will make the file system less robust.

[Flying Fox]

NCQ has nothing to do with needing a UPS.

Well... it is conceivable that allowing the drive to service requests out-of-order (which is what NCQ does) could increase the window for data corruption or loss in the event of a power interruption. Even journaling file systems like NTFS (and EXT3 on Linux) make assumptions about the order in which write operations are committed to the physical media. Anything that messes with that order will make the file system less robust.

However, assuming the same more conservative caching policy, when a request is done it is done. So you won't get the kind of corruption where the application thinks data is written but it is not. Data loss definitely, but I don't think corruption is it. A higher level corruption from the application point of view may be, but from an I/O standpoint, it completed the last request. Right?