Fair enough :) There's the problem of badly designed APIs, and there's the problem of crap hardware that lies to you. IME, it's difficult to ensure that data

Fair enough :) There's the problem of badly designed APIs, and there's the problem of crap hardware that lies to you. IME, it's difficult to ensure that data "written" to disk has actually reached the disk, without disabling the drive's cache. This was true even with spinning rust, and continues to be true with SSDs. I'd rather not get started on read-after-write, with inline checksums in order to verify that your disk isn't lying to you. In an ideal world, we'd have both well-designed APIs as well as hardware that isn't crap. If I had to choose between the two, I'd go with good hardware, because the API problem can at least be worked around - albeit with a significant investment in time, effort and pain. I feel your pain, and wish you good luck in your efforts.