EXT was and still is a joke. I remember reading about the 2 minute drain and I almost peed my pants. EXT3 had the nice feature of randomly stopping to boot after enough reboots on enough machines. Thankfully I no longer run any volume of this crap.
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:55:30AM +0000, Russell Howe wrote: > Michal wrote, sometime around 11/11/09 11:40: > >> I know this is a bit off topic, but storage devices have battery's on >> RAID cards for a reason. If you are worried about read/writes etc when a >> system dies, there are measures you can take > > Probably even more OT, but... > > Although some (most?) RAID cards which have a battery option will only > let you enable the write cache if you have a battery installed. > Certainly the HP P400 cards we have do. > > There has been endless discussion about data loss in these types of > scenarios on the XFS mailing list - it journals metadata but not data, > so if your application (e.g. vim) overwrites files by first truncating > them to 0 length and then writing out the data, you'll find that the > truncate and the resize of the file are all nicely replayed from the > journal after the crash, but if the machine died before your data hit > the disk, all you'll get when you read() is \0\0\0\0... > > Since ext4 has started to implement similar features in similar ways to > XFS, the ext4 folk are running into the same old problems. > > -- > Russell Howe, IT Manager. <rh...@bmtmarinerisk.com> > BMT Marine & Offshore Surveys Ltd.