At 09:28 18-4-2002 -0600, Jim Buzbee wrote:
We've got a bit of an issue. From conversations on this list over the
last few months, it appears as if enabling the write cache on an IDE
drive is a "bad thing" when using a journaling file system such as XFS.
But, when talking to drive manufacturers, we are told that if the write
cache is disabled, the life of the drive is substantially reduced. This
puts us in a bit of a hard place. We have little choice but to turn the
write cache on.
If that was so a lot of disks would be failing these days. It's all nice
and dandy but if your power supply goes, your filesystem integrity will go
with it.
I have never had write cache on any of my disks enabled and I have so far
lost just 4 disks of the 12 over the last 6 years. 2 of which were from a
_really_ bad seagate series drive.
So far all the maxtor drives I have are still alive.
I also have 1 out of 3 IBM deskstar disks which is beginning to fail after
1,5 years.
Repeatingley switching disks on and off is not really good for the disk either.
Workaround: Don't use the disk.
;)
Cheers
--
Seth
It might just be your lucky day, if you only knew.
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