On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 12:38:54AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > [ CC to Kurt and Steven on bsdi list.] > > Guys, I just replied to this email on the BSDi email list. The issue is > that someone found that some(most?) IDE drives have write cache enabled, > though the drives do not preserve the write cache data on power failure. > > I am surprised we have not heard of this failure before because I know > most vendors who ship PostgreSQL test our crash recovery thoroughly. > Are they testing only using SCSI drives? > > Below you will read that my Seagate SCSI drive has write cache disabled, > but another guy has a Seagate IDE drive that has it enabled, though it > loses data on power failure. > > Scarey! > > Does anyone have any more detailed information on this?
Not really, just that I had data corruption on SCSI disks which had write cache enabled and tagged queueing. Disabling write cache has allowed them to function flawlessly since. The moral seems to be: write cache gives pretty performance figures, but you really want it swiched off. Cheers, Patrick ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly