Re: file corruption

[Chris Wedgwood <cw@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 06:25:12PM -0800, Christian Rice wrote:

> Has anyone mentioned turning off write caching?
>
> hdparm -W 0 /dev/hda

Actually, this is a good point, until XFS gets some write-barrier
support this is probably a good idea.

> This for me made the difference between rebuilding up to five system
> disks per day (out of one hundred desktop workstations, and that was
> a couple years ago), and rebuilding...none per day.

Newer drives with 8MB caches are worse...  you can get quite a bit of
data reordered and/or lost.  I'm not sure if TCQ makes this worse or
not, I suspect it probably does.

Turning off write-caching hurts a little in performance with once
there is write-barrier support write-caching can be reenabled.



  --cw