Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 12:57:16 +1030 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Steve Byan <stephen_byan@maxtor.com> Cc: phk@freebsd.org, freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, tech-kern@netbsd.org Subject: Track buffering (was: DEV_B_SIZE) Message-ID: <20030201022716.GO92530@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <F4D99E08-353D-11D7-B26B-00306548867E@maxtor.com> References: <2639.1044031853@critter.freebsd.dk> <F4D99E08-353D-11D7-B26B-00306548867E@maxtor.com>
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On Friday, 31 January 2003 at 12:03:44 -0500, Steve Byan wrote: > > On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 11:50 AM, phk@freebsd.org wrote: >> It was my impression that already many drives write entire tracks >> as atomic units, at least we have had plenty of anecdotal evidence >> to this effect ? > > I'm not aware of any SCSI or ATA disks which do this; certainly no > Maxtor disk does. Count-key-data mainframe disks can be formatted to do > so, but such disks probably don't run Unix. Caching in ATA disks might > lead one to believe that the disk could corrupt an entire track, in the > sense that a panic ( aka bluescreen) or a power-failure would cause all > pending writes in its buffer to be lost, but even in ATA-land I don't > believe a power failure would result in more than one disk block > returning an uncorrectable read error. A couple of years back I did some power fail testing on IBM IDE drives. On one occasion I managed to blow out a whole range of sectors (about 80), which I attributed to trashing a track buffer. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
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