Mark Hahn wrote:
I would suggest that you should run with the write cache disabled unless
you can verify working barrier support.
this is true, but extremely conservative/paranoid. it makes a lot
of sense if you're handling banking transactions or if you really
see a lot of abrupt power-offs (yank the battery). what are the chances
of a drive failing to write dirty blocks when idle, halting?
The write cache in modern drives is multiple megabytes - 8 or 16MB is
not uncommon. The chances that you have data that is lost on a power
failure in the write cache is actually quite high...
I agree that most people should not lose too much sleep over this.
don't get me wrong: write barriers are A Good Thing. just that Linux
survived very nicely for many years before such things were bothered with.
The fact that your drive reports IO errors is also worrying - you might
just have a bad drive... You can look at drive help with tools like
smartctl.
IO errors trump any concerns for write barriers - there's no need to
even think about barriers or cache settings if the disk is, for instance,
reporting media errors...
Agreed again ;-)
ric
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