[linux-lvm] Re: [PATCH] 64 bit scsi read/write

[Jonathan Lundell]

At 9:45 AM +0100 2001-07-14, Alan Cox wrote:
>  > If, after a power outage, the IDE disk can keep going for long enough
>>  to write its write cache out to the reserved vendor area (which will
>>  only take 20-30 milliseconds) then the data may be considered *safe*
>>  as soon as it hits writecache.
>
>Hohohoho.
>
>>  In which case it is perfectly legitimate and sensible for the drive
>>  to ignore flush commands, and to ack data as soon as it hits cache.
>
>Since the flushing commands are 'optional' it can legitimately ignore them
>
>>  If I'm right then the only open question is: which disks do and
>>  do not do the right thing when the lights go out.
>
>As far as I can tell none of them at least in the IDE world

It's not so great in the SCSI world either. Here's a bit from the 
Ultrastar 73LZX functional spec (this is the current-technology 
Ultra160 73GB family):

>5.0 Data integrity
>The drive retains recorded information under all non-write operations.
>No more than one sector will be lost by power down during write 
>operation while write cache is
>disabled.
>If power down occurs before completion of data transfer from write 
>cache to disk while write cache is
>enabled, the data remaining in write cache will be lost. To prevent 
>this data loss at power off, the
>following action is recommended:
>* Confirm successful completion of SYNCHRONIZE CACHE (35h) command.

What's worse, though the spec is not explicit on this point, it 
appears that the write cache is lost on a SCSI reset, which is 
typically used by drivers for last-resort error recovery. And of 
course a SCSI bus reset affects all the drives on the bus, not just 
the offending one.
-- 
/Jonathan Lundell.