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Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers...Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers...Posted Sep 1, 2009 22:37 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)In reply to: Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers... by dlang Parent article: Ext3 and RAID: silent data killers?
> disabling write caches
> > this is mandatory unless you have battery backed cache to recover from > failed writes. period, end of statement. if you don't do this you _will_ > loose data when you loose power.
If this is true (and I don't doubt that it is), why on earth is it not the default? Shipping software with such an unsafe default setting is stupid. Most users have no ideas about these settings... surely they shouldn't be handed a delicious pizza smeared with nitroglycerin topping, and then be blamed when they bite into it and it explodes...
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Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers... Posted Sep 1, 2009 22:41 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
simple, enabling the write cache gives you a 10x (or better) performance boost for all the times when your system doesn't loose power.
the market has shown that people are willing to take this risk by driving all vendors that didn't make the change out of the marketplace
Ext3 and write caching by drives are the data killers... Posted Sep 3, 2009 7:58 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
True, but it would be good if there was something simple like "apt-get install data-integrity" in major distros, which would then help the user configure the system for high integrity by default and this was well publicised. This could include things like: disabling write cache, periodic fsck's, ext3 data=journal, etc.
It would still be better if distros made this the default but I don't see much prospect of this.
One other example of disregard for data integrity that I've noticed is that Ubuntu (and probably Debian) won't fsck a filesystem (including root!) if the system is on batteries. This is very dubious - the fsck might exhaust the battery, but the user might well prefer a while without use of their laptop due to no battery to a long time without use of their valuable data when the system gets corrupted later on...
Fortunately on my desktop with a UPS, on_ac_power returns 255 which counts as 'not on battery' for the /etc/init.d/check*.sh scripts.
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