On Aug 18, 2011, at 2:07 AM, Mark Kirkwood wrote:

> On 18/08/11 17:35, Craig Ringer wrote:
>> On 18/08/2011 11:48 AM, Ogden wrote:
>>> Isn't this very dangerous? I have the Dell PERC H700 card - I see that it 
>>> has 512Mb Cache. Is this the same thing and good enough to switch to 
>>> nobarrier? Just worried if a sudden power shut down, then data can be lost 
>>> on this option.
>>> 
>>> 
>> Yeah, I'm confused by that too. Shouldn't a write barrier flush data to 
>> persistent storage - in this case, the RAID card's battery backed cache? Why 
>> would it force a RAID controller cache flush to disk, too?
>> 
>> 
> 
> If the card's cache has a battery, then the cache is preserved in the advent 
> of crash/power loss etc - provided it has enough charge, so setting 
> 'writeback' property on arrays is safe. The PERC/SERVERRAID cards I'm 
> familiar (LSI Megaraid rebranded models) all switch to write-though mode if 
> they detect the battery is dangerously discharged so this is not normally a 
> problem (but commit/fsync performance will fall off a cliff when this 
> happens)!
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Mark


So a setting such as this:

Device Name         : /dev/sdb
Type                : SAS
Read Policy         : No Read Ahead
Write Policy        : Write Back
Cache Policy        : Not Applicable
Stripe Element Size : 64 KB
Disk Cache Policy   : Enabled


Is sufficient to enable nobarrier then with these settings?

Thank you

Ogden
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