Mark Lewis wrote:
The naive approach works on IDE drives because they don't (usually) honor the request to write the data immediately, so it can fill its write cache up with several megabytes of data and write it out to the disk at its leisure.
FWIW - If you are using MacOS X or Windows, then later SATA (in particular, not sure about older IDE) will honor the request to write immediately, even if the disk write cache is enabled.
I believe that Linux 2.6+ and SATA II will also behave this way (I'm thinking that write barrier support *is* in 2.6 now - however you would be wise to follow up on the Linux kernel list if you want to be sure!)
In these cases data integrity becomes similar to SCSI - however, unless you buy SATA specifically designed for a server type workload (e.g WD Raptor), then ATA/SATA tend to fail more quickly if used in this way (e.g. 24/7, hot/dusty environment etc).
Cheers Mark
