RE: questions regarding Journalling-FSes and w-cache reordering

Torrey Hoffman (thoffman@arnor.net)
09 Apr 2003 14:35:55 -0700

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 13:12, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mer, 2003-04-09 at 20:52, Mudama, Eric wrote:
> > ATA hard drives are allowed to reorder/merge/etc their write caches if write
> > cache is enabled. With write caching enabled, there is no guarantee that
> > dirty data will be flushed in any specific order, nor does the ATA protocol
> > support any such ordering beyond the global flush cache command.
>
> To cheer people up further by the way, not all ATA drives support cache
> flush, some drives dont support write cache disable and others implement
> write/verify as write.

Can anyone recommend some decent 120 GB or larger IDE drives which don't
play these games?

I'd like to build a reliable ~1 TB RAID 5 from IDE drives. I will
gladly give up performance for high reliability and low cost.

My current 240 GB RAID 5 is built from five 60 GB Maxtor IDEs, with a
Reiser FS on it. I use hdparm to disable write cache... unless Maxtor
ignores that? Does anyone know? I can check the exact model numbers
of the drives if it matters.

Is there documentation anywhere that says which drives cut corners?
Any other suggestions on how to build a cheap but reliable RAID?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Torrey Hoffman <thoffman@arnor.net>


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