Flush disk write cache

windows windows-xp disk
selwyn picture selwyn · Oct 6, 2008 · Viewed 17.3k times · Source

When the policy for a disk in Windows XP and Vista is set to enable write caching on the hard disk, is there a way to flush a file that has just been written, and ensure that it has been committed to disk?

I want to do this programmatically in C++.

Closing the file does perform a flush at the application level, but not at the operating system level. If the power is removed from the PC after closing the file, but before the operating system has flushed the disk write cache, the file is lost, even though it was closed.

Answer

jimvfr picture jimvfr · Jul 19, 2011

.NET FileStream.Flush() will NOT flush the Windows cache for that file content; Flush() only flushes the .NET internal file buffer. In .NET 4.0, Microsoft fixed the problem by adding an optional parameter to Flush() which if set true causes FlushFileSystemBuffers to be called. In .NET 3.5 and below your only choice is to call FlushFileBuffers via pinvoke. See MSDN'sFileStream.Flush community comment for how to do this.

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