Can I disable "write-cache buffer flushing" for an Intel 730 SSD on a desktop PC

Question

Can I disable "write-cache buffer flushing" for an Intel 730 SSD on a desktop PC without UPS? This drive has capacitors for power-loss protection - is this enough to flush the buffers when a power loss occurs?

Answer 1

In my experience the power-loss protection for SSD's is somewhat over exaggerated and does not work as advertised in reality, although better than not having power-loss protection it certainly does not complete eliminate the risk of loss data if a power outage occurs whilst the drive is in use (we rolled out around 400 SSD's in an office environment and paid premium for power-loss protection but it still occurred with power cut/outages).

You can disable write cache buffer from the device manager, simply load device manager > expand Disk Drives > right click your drive and properties > check for the setting under policies.

The only real protection is with a desktop UPS (under desk one) which are great for not only preventing data loss but also the health of your machine overall.

Edit:

Your post did spark my interest and upon reading a review of some of the newer Intel drives it does seem a lot more reliable than previous (my experience was from SSD's around 3 years ago).

Quote: Continuing with the enterprise features, there is full power-loss protection similar to what's in the S3500/S3700. I'm surprised that we've seen so few client SSDs with power-loss protection. Given the recent studies of power-loss bricking SSDs, power-loss protection should make a good feature at least in the high-end SSDs.

Question is do you trust it? It is hard to advise either way.