dangerous situation with shutdown process

[Matthias Buelow]

David Taylor wrote:

>No.  I'm just asking if you know of ANY ata drives that will wait for the
>cache to be flushed before claiming the disable cache command has
>succeeded.  I don't, but I haven't looked.

I don't know either. I assume that they do. Does it matter?
I mean, I'm not suggesting a frivolous new theory that is highly
speculative and warrants a lengthy debate on its purported merits.
What I described is common practice on Windows, Linux and probably
a few other systems and I would think that they're not doing this
for nothing. And, frankly, I'm a bit astonished that the FreeBSD
(community) seems to be so ignorant of well-known measures for
improving data safety on consumer-grade desktop hardware. Does that
mean that FreeBSD is deemed generally unsuited for desktop and
laptop use and should be reserved for servers with the appropriate
(expensive) hardware? I hope not.

mkb.