The Lies Disks and Their Drivers Tell

davecb writes "Pity the poor filesystem designer: they just want to know when their data is safe, but the disks and drivers try so hard to make I/O 'easy' that it ends up being stupidly hard. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes about the difficulties in making the systems work nicely together: 'In the real world, many of the drives targeted to the desktop market do not implement the NCQ specification. To ensure reliability, the system must either disable the write cache on the disk or issue a cache-flush request after every metadata update, log update (for journaling file systems), or fsync system call. Both of these techniques lead to noticeable performance degradation, so they are often disabled, putting file systems at risk if the power fails. Systems for which both speed and reliability are important should not use ATA disks. Rather, they should use drives that implement Fibre Channel, SCSI, or SATA with support for NCQ.'"

Comments

Re:almost clicked the link...

[causality]

LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE! YOU WILL LOSE DATA!

Sorry... I'm usually a calm rational person. I almost never become a grammar-nazi, spelling nazi, or troll. It's just that I see this so often I'm afraid one day Webster will just give up and switch the definitions of Lose and Loose.

It's a socially patterned form of mindlessness. I especially like to call it "an example of sheeple" because that word seems to really, really stick in some peoples' craw. Perhaps the whole sheep/shepherd analogy is too accurate for them to handle?

At any rate ... five years ago I never saw anyone making that error. Then, one day, lots of people started doing it all at once. It's as though many tens of thousands of people all got together in a big smoky stadium and conspired to all do the same stupid thing.

While I seriously doubt there was an actual formal conspiracy, it definitely is an example of following the crowd without critical thought (the domain of individuals) and mindlessly imitating what is seen. When people can't even come up with their own mistakes anymore, you know individuality is in trouble. The funny thing is, each of these people would swear (and probably pass a polygraph) that they are individuals. The most sincere belief in the world is useless if it's inconsistent with observed reality.

So that's another item on the list of things people develop by means of monkey-see-monkey-do instead of observation and introspection. Previous entries on that list include personality, mannerisms, tastes/preferences, lack of situational awareness due to self-absorption, and the inability to drive a vehicle for five miles without repeatedly crossing over the double-yellow line.

On the whole we certainly are a "fine" species.