> Writeback cache on disk in iteself is not bad, it only gets bad if the > disk is not engineered to save all its dirty cache on power loss, > using the disk motor as a generator or alternatively a small battery. > It would be awfully nice to know which brands fail here, if any, > because writeback cache is a big performance booster. AFAIK no drive saves the cache. The worst case cache flush for drives is several seconds with no retries and a couple of minutes if something really bad happens. This is why the kernel has some knowledge of barriers and uses them to issue flushes when needed. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html