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Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 17:30:13 -0500
From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
To: Dieter <freebsd@sopwith.solgatos.com>
Message-ID: <20051207173013.A29261@cons.org>
References: <200512072205.WAA17272@sopwith.solgatos.com>
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In-Reply-To: <200512072205.WAA17272@sopwith.solgatos.com>;
	from freebsd@sopwith.solgatos.com on Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at
	02:05:40PM +0000
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Disk write caching, hw.ata.wc and atacontrol disagree
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Dieter wrote on Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 02:05:40PM +0000: 
> I'm trying to turn off the evil data corrupting on-disk write cache.
> 
> I added hw.ata.wc=0 to /boot/loader.conf and rebooted.
> 
> # sysctl hw.ata.wc    
> hw.ata.wc: 0
> 
> So far so good.  But! atacontrol cap ad4 says:
> 
> Feature                      Support  Enable    Value           Vendor
> write cache                    yes      yes
> 
> So hw.ata.wc thinks that the disk write cache is off,
> but atacontrol cap thinks the disk write cache is on?

I remember this is working but there was a reporting problem in
atacontrol.

You should easily be able to tell whether it is on or off by the write
performance.  It should plummet by a factor of 4 or so.

cstream -i- -o/mnt/wherever/tmpfile -v1

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/