On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 12:40:59PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Indeed, that would be a problem.
> Anyway, some generous souls just gave me an external SCSI drive, so the
> case for the IDE is closed. ;-)
>
> But, for future refference, is there a way to tell if an IDE drive is
> doing bad things? I mean, other than pressing Reset repeatedly...
> Or perhaps someone put up a list of good/bad IDE drives, in regard to
> the caching problem...
> I guess this should be interesting for anyone using a journalised FS.
Some IDE drives lie about things like write-cache and the ordering of
writes. For example, you can issue the command to turn write-cache off,
but it doesn't really happen.
Likewise, an IDE drive may report it has written a block of data, but
it hasn't, meaning you can't garantee write ordering.
I wish hard drive reviews would include information like this. I have
heard that things like the IBM Ultrastar and Seagate Barracuda are fully
compliant with all commands, but have never tried to test the theory.
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