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Ext3/Ext4 data integrity guaranteesExt3/Ext4 data integrity guaranteesPosted May 29, 2008 20:52 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547)Parent article: Quotes of the week I turn off IDE disk write caching on all machines I maintain in order to really get the data integrity that journaling promises, and Andrew Morton drops data integrity patches because he worries about the speed impact of barriers and flushes (which are much less). If Linux used barriers and flushes to get data integrity, and I knew about that, I could turn on the write cache and see a speedup. However, I did not come across information about such issues despite being interested, and looking around now and then (and what I read did not inspire confidence), so I went ahead and disabled the write cache. If I cared more about speed than data integrity, I would use XFS instead of ext3 in the first place. OTOH, if the Linux maintainers don't care for data integrity, maybe I should be looking for another kernel. Fortunately, looking through the thread, it seems that sanity seems to have come back to the Linux maintainers. Concerning what can be lost with write caching enabled and without barriers, I have run a little test several years ago on two disk drives, and they both lost data that was several seconds old(er than data that ended up on the disk).
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