On 2013-12-18 15:14, dick wrote: >>However, my understanding is that they have a small on-drive >>battery/capacitor that stores sufficient energy for the cached >>write(s) to complete in the event the system's power abruptly cuts >>off. >> >>Granted, this is purely hearsay, as it's been a long time since I >>mucked around with hardware much. >> > The drives may have something like that now, but they didn't have > any power down flush capability when I was working for WD. Of > course, that was 15 years ago...
<old_fart> Indeed, I certainly remember launching park.exe on my DOS & Win95 machines to flush write-caches and park the heads in preparation of power-down. </old_fart> I recall being told by multiple hardware professionals since 2000 that such wasn't needed any more. I don't have reason to doubt them, especially as I no longer see references to parking heads in any OS or add-on utility. At least on linux (possibly the BSDs too), one can specify that particular mounts are done with the "sync" option to force all writes to make it to the metal/EEPROM before returning, though I don't think this is the default. -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list