> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Theo de Raadt > Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 2:51 PM > To: Michael Favinsky > Cc: '[email protected]' > Subject: Re: ATA Soft Updates or Write Caching > > > When using ATA drives, I have to make a choice between write caching or > soft > > updates, since write caching with soft updates creates an unsafe > situation. > > I assume by 'write caching' you mean async. > > No. You have that wrong. > > async is always unsafe. > > Everything else you say says that you consider performance more important > than safety. There is no balance. We could remove the options that > provide > rope, but then the amount of whiners would increase..
I think he is referring to this passage from the FreeBSD book: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html "If a system should crash after the kernel accepts a chunk of data for writing to disk, but before that data is actually written out, data could be lost or corrupted. This risk is extremely small, but generally manageable. Use of IDE write caching greatly increases this risk; it is strongly recommended that you disable IDE write caching when using Soft Updates." I am just the messenger using google, so don't shoot me.
