Mark Kirkwood wrote: > 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). The definitive guide to servers vs. desktop drives is: http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper/D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf -- Bruce Momjian http://candle.pha.pa.us EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
