External USB HDDs - Write Caching

I would like to be able to disable Write Caching for both of my external drives. One HDD is a 1TB, FAT32 formatted drive which allows me to disable write caching whereas my 650GB, NTFS formatted drive has the option completely grayed out.



As you can see from these screen shots (click to enlarge them), the drives look very different and for whatever reason, the option to disable write caching on the NTFS drive is not possible. I'm currently running Vista Ultimate x64 and have updated all drivers and BIOS. If anyone has an ideas, I'd be grateful for any information about how to disable this.

I think write caching is disabled for external drives by default under Vista.

Out of curiosity, why do you wish to alter these settings?

My external HDDs store a LOT of information which I have no need to have write cached. Since write caching can cause data corruption with a sudden loss of power, I was looking to minimize this possibility by removing write caching. The FAT32 drive disables fine but the NTFS one will not where it had allowed me to under XP before.

Not sure if there's a permission somewhere which is currently set to not allow NTFS drives the ability to not write cache.