Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1761922AbYAROYY (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:24:24 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1756944AbYAROYP (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:24:15 -0500 Received: from BISCAYNE-ONE-STATION.MIT.EDU ([18.7.7.80]:38230 "EHLO biscayne-one-station.mit.edu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756796AbYAROYO (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:24:14 -0500 Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:23:08 -0500 From: Theodore Tso To: Bryan Henderson Cc: Ric Wheeler , Al Boldi , Alan Cox , David Chinner , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Pavel Machek , Daniel Phillips , Rik van Riel , Valerie Henson Subject: Re: [Patch] document ext3 requirements (was Re: [RFD] Incremental fsck) Message-ID: <20080118142308.GD12796@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , Bryan Henderson , Ric Wheeler , Al Boldi , Alan Cox , David Chinner , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Pavel Machek , Daniel Phillips , Rik van Riel , Valerie Henson References: <478FE22D.9030907@emc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.15+20070412 (2007-04-11) X-Spam-Flag: NO X-Spam-Score: 0.00 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1283 Lines: 27 On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 04:31:48PM -0800, Bryan Henderson wrote: > But I heard some years ago from a disk drive engineer that that is a myth > just like the rotational energy thing. I added that to the discussion, > but admitted that I haven't actually seen a disk drive write a partial > sector. Well, it would be impossible or at least very hard to see that in practice, right? My understanding is that drives do sector-level checksums, so if there was a partially written sector, the checksum would be bogus and the drive would return an error when you tried to read from it. > Ted brought up the separate issue of the host sending garbage to the disk > device because its own power is failing at the same time, which makes the > integrity at the disk level moot (or even undesirable, as you'd rather > write a bad sector than a good one with the wrong data). Yep, exactly. It would be interesting to see if this happens on modern hardware; all of the evidence I've had for this is years old at this point. - Ted -- 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/