On Wednesday 30 July 2003 15:39, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> > It's yet worse than this. Some IDE drives will respond to the
> > command to turn off write cacheing, but they _don't actually turn it
> > off_. In other words, you think you've done the right thing, and you
> > haven't anyway.
> Is there an interface to control this with IDE drives? I know there is
> scsicmd for SCSI, but I didn't think IDE had any similar interface to
> control the drive.
What Andrew is saying is that on some IDE drives it doesn't matter what the OS
tells the drive to do. According to the Linux hdparm man page, the desired
flag is '-W':
-W Disable/enable the IDE drive’s write-caching feature (default state is undeterminable;
manufacturer/modelspecific).
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute