i've been having a problem with my external drive, even though i disable write caching, i still get intermittent 'delay write failure' on the drive after resuming from hibernation - or just just removing the drive without first "disconnecting".
but with delay write caching disabled, there shouldn't be a problem should there?!
frustrating. but i set out to fix this one. and while playing around with settings, i accidentally turned off write caching on my laptop's main drive. after that point, putting the laptop into hibernation was painfully slow. so slow the first time i glanced over to the laptop during the process and thought it simply locked up, so i forced the power off. not good.
anyway, i've enabled write caching on the drive again, and the hibernation process is back to normal.
i'm still stuck with this phantom delay write caching issue that doesn't make any sense. apparently so are a lot of others folks, and for a wide variety of issues. i'm not sure, but it might be related to maximum transfer rate of 1024Kb/s.
lots of information here:
http://www.bustrace.com/products/delayedwrite.htm