Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sat, 24 Nov 2001 12:32:02 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sat, 24 Nov 2001 12:31:51 -0500 Received: from mercury.rus.uni-stuttgart.de ([129.69.1.226]:42629 "EHLO mercury.rus.uni-stuttgart.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sat, 24 Nov 2001 12:31:37 -0500 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Journaling pointless with today's hard disks? In-Reply-To:

<20011124103642.A32278@vega.ipal.net> From: Florian Weimer Date: 24 Nov 2001 18:31:34 +0100 In-Reply-To: <20011124103642.A32278@vega.ipal.net> (Phil Howard's message of "Sat, 24 Nov 2001 10:36:42 -0600") Message-ID: Lines: 39 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090001 (Oort Gnus v0.01) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Phil Howard writes: > | That seems more like a case of "hard drives being pointless > | for people wanting to store their data" ;) > > Or at least "powering down IBM DTLA series hard drives is pointless > for people wanting to store their data". We have got a DTLA drive which shows the typical symptoms without being powered down regularly. The defective sectors simply appeared during normal operation. But that's not the point, I'm pretty convinced that the DTLA problems are not caused by aborted writes. However, I'm scared by a major hard disk manufacturer using such a faulty approach, and claiming it's reasonable. Maybe you can gain some performance this way, maybe the firmware is easier to write. If there's such a motivation, other manufacturers will follow and soon, there won't be any reliably drives to buy for us (just being a bit paranoid...). > Now I can see a problem if the drive can't flush a write-back cache > during the "power fade". With some pretty big caches many drives > have these days (although I wonder just how useful that is with OS > caches being as good as they are), They can reorder writes and eliminate dead writes, breaking journaling (especially if the journal is on a different disk than the actual data). ;-) In fact, the "cache" is probably just memory used for quite a few different purposes: scatter/gather support, command queuing, storing the firmware, and so on. Emptying the caches in time is not a problem, BTW. You just don't get a full write in this case (and lose some data), but you shouldn't see any bad sectors. -- Florian Weimer Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE University of Stuttgart http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/ RUS-CERT +49-711-685-5973/fax +49-711-685-5898 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/