Re: Why is O_DSYNC on linux so slow / what's wrong with my SSD?

From: Howard Chu
Date: Wed Nov 20 2013 - 11:26:42 EST


Theodore Ts'o wrote:
Historically, Intel has been really good about avoiding this, but
since they've moved to using 3rd party flash controllers, I now advise
everyone who plans to use any flash storage, regardless of the
manufacturer, to do their own explicit power fail testing (hitting the
reset button is not good enough, you need to kick the power plug out
of the wall, or better yet, use a network controlled power switch you
so you can repeat the power fail test dozens or hundreds of times for
your qualification run) before being using flash storage in a mission
critical situation where you care about data integrity after a power
fail event.

Speaking of which, what would you use to automate this sort of test? I'm thinking an SSD connected by eSATA, with an external power supply, and the host running inside a VM. Drop power to the drive at the same time as doing a kill -9 on the VM, then you can resume the VM pretty quickly instead of waiting for a full reboot sequence.

--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
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