Am 23.01.23 um 19:47 schrieb Genes Lists:
So the hardware just lies -
What a surprise. Disk firmware has been lying for ages. Acknowledging write barriers or cache flushes early, to look good in benchmarks, for instance.
perhaps they should just add a capacitor on board with enough juice to finish the cache flush or something.
This has been done already. Look for disks with power-loss protection. But these emergency flushes seem to come with downsides too, because the firmware cares to count them and report the counter as SMART attribute of type "Old_age".
Have you observed any ill effects?
Of what? Waiting two more seconds for power-off? No. I am running some large arrays of rotating disks. Power-loss head retract is certainly a factor for wear and totally avoidable. And about SSDs? I do not know. Some people reported SSDs had been bricked by sudden power-loss. I believe this happend to me some years ago, but you never know why some hardware starts acting up. Why take the risk? I could not care less about a machine needing some seconds more to power off or reboot, compared to the headache of changing drives and restoring from backup. Which is never current, BTW. :-) BR