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Date:      Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:08:25 +1000
From:      "Chris Knight" <chris@aims.com.au>
To:        <silby@silby.com>
Cc:        <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive.
Message-ID:  <004601c226ed$838bff50$020aa8c0@aims.private>
In-Reply-To: <20020708195133.K19349-100000@patrocles.silby.com>

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Howdy,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Mike Silbersack
> Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 10:53
> To: Peter Wemm
> Cc: Julian Elischer; John Nielsen; hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> So, this basically means that even a journalling filesystem wouldn't
> be much safer... how about battery backed up controllers - would those
> provide protection?  (I suspect not, but maybe they're more 
> sophisticated than I thought.)
> 
That's right - a journalled filesystem doesn't help. Nor does battery
backed up controllers.
If the drive has come back and told the controller that it has written
the data, then the controller - battery backed up or not - will mark
those sectors as written. If it's a caching controller, then the cache
entries for those sectors will be returned to the free list pool.
The only way a journalled filesystem would help is if during replay, it
checked that all the sectors matched prior to the checkpoint; ie write
out all the sectors after the last checkpoint, then check sectors prior
to the last checkpoint. That way, the journalled filesystem would know
that the data had been written correctly.
Does anyone have a detailed list of which SCSI drives do track writes
rather than sector writes?

Regards,
Chris Knight
Systems Administrator
AIMS Independent Computer Professionals
Tel: +61 3 6334 6664  Fax: +61 3 6331 7032  Mob: +61 419 528 795
Web: http://www.aims.com.au 



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