First of all, ext(2|3|4) and XFS filesystems honor fsync. That's what all the noise about Firefox and SQLite was all about. Secondly the HP RAID controllers I'

First of all, ext(2|3|4) and XFS filesystems honor fsync. That's what all the noise about Firefox and SQLite was all about. Secondly the HP RAID controllers I'm familiar with disable the drive write cache by default, and throw dire warnings if you try to turn it on, and make you ACK your choice like: Without the proper safety precautions, use of write cache on physical drives could cause data loss in the event of a power failure.... The bottom line is that Database pros insist on and get actual durability, and with a battery backed write cache, it's not painful.