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Your Hard Drive Lies to You
fenderdb writes "Brad Fitzgerald of LiveJournal fame has written a utility and a quick article on how all hard drives from the consumer level to the highest level 'enterprise' grade SCSI and SATA drives do not obey the fsync() function. Manufacturers are blatantly sacrificing integrity in favor of scoring higher on 'pure speed' performance benchmarking."
There was an interesting discussion on this topic a while ago on Apple's Darwin development list a while ago.
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i know all disks ultimately fail, but it's frustrating that some can be really abused and run for years, when others die abruptly.
While working at said hard disk company i had one of their smaller disks sitting on the end of a steel ruler on my desk. I spun round on my chair, as i do when i'm thinking, and hit the other end of the ruler with my elbow. This of course launched the disk across the room, slamming it against the wall.
Given that I was in the process of writing software to diagnose failure's I was quite excited about this accident. Of course i return the disk to the test setup and there's nothing wrong.
In my experience, the only sure fire way to have a disk fail is to place any piece of important, but un-backed-up, work on it.