Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] "missing" files after hard crash or power failure

[Dave Lloyd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> Mark Rages wrote:
> > On 4/2/07, shawn parker <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > > checked lost+found thinking that could be the issue. empty.
> >
> > My intuition is that a bogus script is going through and deleting
> > things.  ext2 is a very, very well tested filesystem.   And I'm not
> > able to think of a failure mode that would unlink all normal files.
>
> But I have heard of problems, where even if the filesystem is extremely well 
> tested and effective, that the hard drive itself caches data.  Then the OS is 
> helpless.

This is true.  It used to be that the good scsi drives would actually
use the rotational momemtum left in the hard drive platters to generate
enough juice to write the data in the (small) write cache to disk.  I
don't believe this feature is still around.  Don't have disk write cache
(check out hdparm) enabled on any device you'd like to have data remain
on.

> Anyway, with ext2, cannot it be operated in either sync or async mode, and 
> async is much faster, but much less forgiving of hardware failures?

Sync mode would likely be unusably slow.

--dlloyd

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