On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
> Some SATA drives were known to not flush their cache when told to.
> Some file systems don't know about this (UFS, older linux kernels, etc).
>
> So yes, if your OS / File System / Controller card combo properly sends the
> write cache flush command, and the drive is not a flawed one, all is well.
> Most should, not all do. Any one of those bits along the chain can
> potentially be disk write cache unsafe.
I can attest to the 2.4 kernel not being able to guarantee fsync on
IDE drives. And to the LSI megaraid SCSI controllers of the era
surviving numerous power off tests.