[ale] USB->IDE problems

[Stephan Uphoff]

You might also want to disable write caching on the ide drive.
This will probably kill your write speed and is rumored to shorten the
lifespan of the drive.
However all filesystems (journaled or not) depend on ordered writes
for file system integrity.
Write buffering reorders writes and can on power failure (unplug)
leave the filesystem in a state not expected by the recovery tools. (fsck)

You might also get an unreadable sector if you unplug the drive while it is 
writing
... but there is nothing you can do about it.
 
	Stephan

> I thought there was away you could tell the kernel to send stuff
> directly to disk and not buffer it.
> 
> On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 11:48, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Ext3 would be a better bet than ext2. The important thing would be a
> > tweak to somehow force frequent sync to avoid file corruption. I don't
> > think that is an hdparm setting. Maybe it could be a cron job
> > 
> > if { `grep -c "/dev/sda" /etc/mtab` != 0 }; then
> > sync
> > fi
> > 
> > (I wouldn't trust that script with anything as I am sure the syntax is
> > wrong)
> > 
> > On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 10:54, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> > > The next question would be how to best deal with file systems of this
> > > nature.  Since anyone could unplug the drive ext2 would not be a good
> > > choice.  Would ext3 be a good choice?  I want to be able to unplug and
> > > plug the device back in without fs corruption.
> > > 
> > > On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 10:43, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Ale mailing list
> > > > Ale at ale.org
> > > > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
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> 
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