To cache or not to cache...

[Jack Browning <spaminacan@charter.net>]

...that is the question.

I was looking at some tuning options and ran across a thread about
journaling file systems and the write cache on ATA drives. The gist of the
thread was that enabling the write cache can result in an inconsistent
(read corrupted) filesystem in the event of a power failure. Disabling the
write cache, of course, results in a performance hit. I've got a UPS, but
it doesn't communicate. When it runs dry and I'm not around, it's lights
out. That sucks, but its the best I can do for right now.

I was wondering what the consensus is. FWIW, I've got two ATA drives, with
/boot on an ext3 partition, and / and /more on reiserfs. The kernel is
2.4.22. Tagged command queueing for IDE drives is in 2.6 but hasn't been
backported (AFAIK) to 2.4.

My options seem to be:

1. Cache and hope for the best.
2. Turn off the cache and wait for 2.6.

TIA,
Jack

-- 
======================================================
* Jack Browning                 mojohand@charter.net *
* 2.4.22                               1d + 17:25:05 *
* 10/09/2003                            08:51:00 CDT *
======================================================

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