Re: ext3 vs reiserfs 3.6

[Adam Skutt <askutt@gmail.com>]

Michal Palka wrote:

> One thing that many people seem to be missing is the fact that their
> drives might have write-cache enabled. In that case, even journalling
> filesystems can be damaged by non-clean unmount if they don't handle the
> caching issues. 
Nope, not quite right.  They're only damaged by drives that either:
* Lie about their cache (i.e., say write-through while being write-back)
* Lie about cache-flushes.

That's most (but not all) IDE drives and SATA drives.  Most SCSI drives do
not participate in this behavior.

> If you use reiserfs or ext3 then you can keep write-cache enabled, since
> those filesystems support that setup via mount options. Use
> barrier=flush for reiserfs and barrier=1 for ext3.
If your drive supports it, which isn't many drives.

Thanks,
Adam