Re: Disk write cache (Was: Hyper-Threading Vulnerability)

Bill Davidsen
2005-05-17T13:16:46Z

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Alan Cox wrote:

> > flashes its cache to NVRAM, or uses rotational energy to save its cache
> > on the platters, please name brand and model and where I can download
> > the material that documents this behavior.
>
> I am not aware of any IDE drive with these properties.

I'm not sure I know of a SCSI drive which does that, either. It was a big
thing a few decades to use rotational energy to park the heads, but I
haven't seen discussion of save to nvram. Then again, I haven't been
looking for it.

What would be ideal is some cache which didn't depend on power to maintain
state, like core (remember core?) or the bubble memory which spent almost
a decade being just slightly too {slow,costly} to replace disk. There
doesn't seem to be a cost effective technology yet.

--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.