On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 04:46:00PM -0400, Michael Adler wrote:
> > So the quesiton is whether it is ever sensible to use write-caching and
> > expect comparable persistence.
>
> Yes. If and only if you have a battery-backed cache. I know of no
> IDE drives that have that, but there's nothing about the spec which
> makes it impossible.
FYI, on a Dual PIV2800 with 2 gig ram and a single UDMA 80 gig hard drive,
I from 420 tps to 22 tps when I disable write caching. WOW. A factor of
about 20 times slower. (pgbench -c 4 -t 100)