As the question states, why is it disabled by default on both Windows 7 and 8? and should one enable it on these new CPUs? does it have any benefits?
You mean the file system cache that you can enable by running: fsutil.exe behavior set memoryusage 2 I'm not really sure why it's disabled by default... Well it's not disabled, actually... It's set to 1, rather than 2. I've used it set to 2. Honestly I didn't notice any speed increase. I guess if you really used a lot of data and had a really fast write speed, it could speed things up quite a bit. The default setting stores like a gigabyte in memory. I guess my hard drives are just too slow to notice a big difference in speeds. I do a lot of integrating using the same data, so I think I'd notice a speed increase, but I'm using non-ssd drives, so it's like one-fourth of the speed it should be.
I did notice a lot slower shutdown/startup when using it set to 2. After it was done processing, it seemed the same or maybe a tiny bit faster. There's probably positives and negatives to using either setting.