Re: safe file systems

David S. Miller (davem@jenolan.rutgers.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 20:49:49 -0400


From: lm@cobaltmicro.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 12:22:23 -0700

The default on every SCSI & FC disk I've ever seen (and I've seen a
fair number including drives from HP, Seagate, Quantum, IBM,
Maxstor, and probably others I'm forgetting) is to /not/ do write
caching. If the drive says the write is done, it is done.

Sort of. I know there are drives which write cache, but only do so
such that the energy from the spindown from a power failure is 2 or 3
times more than would be needed to do the last minute flush of any
cached writes.

Later,
David "Sparc" Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu