> > > > What are ext3 expectations of disk (is there doc somewhere)? For
> > > > example... if disk does not lie, but powerfail during write damages
> > > > the sector -- is ext3 still going to work properly?
> > >
> > > Nope. However the few disks that did this rapidly got firmware updates
> > > because there are other OS's that can't cope.
> > >
> > > > If disk does not lie, but powerfail during write may cause random
> > > > numbers to be returned on read -- can fsck handle that?
> > >
> > > most of the time. and fsck knows about writing sectors to remove read
> > > errors in metadata blocks.
> > >
> > > > What abou disk that kills 5 sectors around sector being written during
> > > > powerfail; can ext3 survive that?
> > >
> > > generally. Note btw that for added fun there is nothing that guarantees
> > > the blocks around a block on the media are sequentially numbered. The
> > > usually are but you never know.
> >
> > Ok, should something like this be added to the documentation?
> >
> > It would be cool to be able to include few examples (modern SATA disks
> > support bariers so are safe, any IDE from 1989 is unsafe), but I do
> > not know enough about hw...
>
> ext3 is not the only filesystem that will have trouble due to
> volatile write caches. We see problems often enough with XFS
> due to volatile write caches that it's in our FAQ:
>
>
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#wcache
