How to turn off hard drive write caching on windows 10 industrial PC's

  Some of our industrial PC's now use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB or LTSC.  Since the change to windows 10 there has been an increase in file corruptions.  A user.config file gets written at the close of a vision inspection program.  If the PC is shut down with the program running, the operating system will close the program.  Hard drive write caching is active by default.  The operating system thinks that the user.config file has been written to the hard drive, but in reality, the file's data has only been moved to the memory.  It may be clear of the PC's RAM, but it has not been written to the physical platter.  Regardless the operating system turns off the computer's power.  When the PC is turned on again, the partial user.config is read.  Since it is incomplete the program does not reload all of the user settings.  Sometimes the corruption is so bad that the program crashes.

  Write caching is turned off from device manager.  

Open device manager, either by typing Device Manager in the search box:

OR open from "ThisPC" properties in file explorer:

In Device Manager, expand Disk drives.  Right click on the drive. Click Properties in the pop up menu.

In the Policy tab you can uncheck Enable Write Caching:

There is not a significant drop in system benchmak score.  However in practical usage of the PC when ever you switch active programs it takes a noticeable amount of time for the new program window to display.

Benchmark with  write caching on:

Benchmark with write caching off: