On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:18:39PM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote: > > What Andrew is saying is that on some IDE drives it doesn't matter > what the OS tells the drive to do. According to the Linux hdparm
Right. In other words, you can't really trust IDE drives, until the manufacturers start guaranteeing that their drives will respond to the commands you send. I suspect that some manufacturers are better than others, but I haven't been able to find any reliable data about this. The failure to obey commands to turn off write caching is something I have both seen reported by others and experienced myself, so I am sure that it happens. But who does it (or doesn't do it), I've no idea. The case I saw was, I believe, a Maxtor drive, and it happened about 2 years ago, IIRC. A -- ---- Andrew Sullivan 204-4141 Yonge Street Liberty RMS Toronto, Ontario Canada <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> M2P 2A8 +1 416 646 3304 x110 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend