[Info-vax] Do any disks still lie about writing data to permanent storage ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-07-07, Jan-Erik Söderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>
> The disk was not lying. It said "I have the data in my cache".
> You just had to understand that it was that it was saying.
>

Well, it's not allowed to do that. The drive APIs in question say
the drive can only return this status to the device driver after the
data has been written to permanent storage. That's the whole point
of those drive APIs.

If it returns that status and the data isn't yet in permanent storage,
then the drive is lying to the device driver about the status of
the data.

> It is you that used the concept of "lying" and that is not
> applicable to hardware. It is humans that lies, not machines.
>

A human wrote the firmware that is lying in this case.

I also note the article I pointed you to called it lying as well.

> I'm not depating the base issue here. You are completely right
> about that... :-)
>

Good to hear. :-) I don't know if it's actually a different culture
thing, but I do indeed regard the disk drive as lying if it returns
that "data committed to permanent storage" status while the data is
still in the drive's cache.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.