Toby, sad that you fall for the last resort of the marketing droids here. All manufactures (and there are only a few left) will sue the hell out of you if you state that their drives don't 'sync'. And each and every drive I have ever used did. So the talk about a distinct borderline between 'enterprise' and 'home' is just cheap and not sustainable.
Also, if you were correct, and ZFS allowed for compromising the metadata of dormant files (folders) by writing metadata for other files (folders), we would not have advanced beyond FAT, and ZFS would be but a short episode in the history of file systems. Or am I the last to notice that atomic writes have been dropped? Especially with atomic writes you either have the last consistent state of the file structure, or the updated one. So what would be the meaning of 'always consistent on the drive' if metadata were allowed to hang in between; in an inconsistent state? You write "What is known, is the last checkpoint." Exactly, and here a contradiction shows: the last checkpoint of all untouched files (plus those read only) does contain exactly all untouched files. How could one allow to compromise the last checkpoint by writing a new one? You are correct with "the feasible recovery mode is a partial". Though here we have heard some stories of total loss. Nobody has questioned that the recovery of an interrupted 'write' must necessarily be partial. What is questioned is the complete loss of semantics. Uwe -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss