There is definitely something strange going on here.
As the bonnie test below shows, the SCSI disk used
for my tests should vastly outperform the old IDE one:
---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
Seagate -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char-
Since the intention of fsync and fdatasync seems to be
to write dirty fs buffers to persistent storage (i.e.
the "oxide") then the best time is not necessarily
the objective. Given the IDE times that people have
been reporting, it is very unlikely that any of those
IDE disks were really doing
