We all know that disabling write cache on drives with no battery backup
is a good thing, and we all know how to do it on your average IDE drive
(hdparm -W0 /dev/hda).
But what about on SATA disks? I've found sdparm, which has settings for
disabling write cache on SCSI disks (and supposedly SATA disks that use
the SCSI device (eg, /dev/sda). It simply doesn't work, though:
[root@sqld xian]# sdparm --set WCE=1 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: ATA Maxtor 7Y250M0 YAR5
change_mode_page: failed setting page: Caching (SBC)
[root@sqld xian]# uname -r
2.6.14-1.1656_FC4smp
Of course I'm using XFS...
The sdparm web page suggests some SCSI commands will be better
implemented in kernel 2.6.15.
The only other thing I might try here is to recompile a 64-bit version
of sdparm, as I downloaded/installed version .96 i386, but this system
is a dual-proc Opteron running 64-bit FC4.
Anyone have any other ideas?
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