Disks only "lie" about write data having been written if they are configured with write cache enabled. In this case they aren't lying at all, they are doing exactly what they were told to do. Turning off write caching will ensure no write completes without having been written to non-volatile storage. There may be isolated incidents where there are legitimate bugs in this functionality, but the overwhelming majority of drives have no issues here.
Posted Oct 27, 2012 7:48 UTC (Sat) by farnz (guest, #17727)
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The historical problem to which people are referring is drives lying. There is a command in the ATA specification, FLUSH CACHE, documented as not completing until all data stored in drive caches is written to the disk. Back before ATX power supplies, many desktop drives completed the FLUSH CACHE command as soon as it came in, and then wrote the data from the cache to the platters as if no FLUSH CACHE command had been received, to improve benchmark results; it was sufficiently common a problem that Microsoft issued a hotfix for Windows 98SE and Windows ME that simply put in a two second delay before powering off the computer.