ide/ata write caching safe now?

[Bruno Wolff III]

For the last several years I have had write caching disabled on my ide/ata
hard drives for safety, but recently I have been seeing information that
suggests I might be able to enable it safely now. I use ext3 file systems
on raid 1 arrays (using md). Based on information I have seen, it looks like
since kernel 2.6.15 everything should be in place to allow enabling write
caching to be safely enabled if I use the barrier=1 option when mounting the
file systems. That option doesn't show up in the man page for mount on fc5, but
does seem to be recognized.

Is this correct, or should I continue to keep the write cache disabled?