>>>> THESE devices have the property of potentially corrupting blocks being >>>> written at the time of the power failure, >>> >>> this is true of all devices >> >> Actually I don't think so. I believe SATA disks do not corrupt even >> the sector they are writing to -- they just have big enough >> capacitors. And yes I believe ext3 depends on that. > > Pavel, no S-ATA drive has capacitors to hold up during a power failure > (or even enough power to destage their write cache). I know this from > direct, personal knowledge having built RAID boxes at EMC for years. In > fact, almost all RAID boxes require that the write cache be hardwired to > off when used in their arrays. I never claimed they have enough power to flush entire cache -- read the paragraph again. I do believe the disks have enough capacitors to finish writing single sector, and I do believe ext3 depends on that. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html