One of these disks is not like the others.

Found a couple of interesting disk storage tidbits. First is diskchecker.pl, a Perl script written by a geek wanting to prove that hard drive manufacturers ignore important things like fsync() calls. In effect, they lie to improve their marketed performance. In short, by ignoring fsync(), the drive can continue to operate in cached (for non-geeks, read as "faster") mode, which increases the speed of the drive while decreasing data safety and stability. Should the drive lose power before cache is written to disk (i.e. an fsync()), data corruption can occur. Summary? Hard drive manufacturers as a whole lie about their performance to sell more drives...from the low end consumer models to the high-end "corporate" expensive models. Yay capitalism.

Part of the discussion on the diskchecker.pl page includes a link to ATA over Ethernet Tools. AoE Tools lets you do crazy things like serve ATA drives as network addressable drive units using AoE. Need a lot of space on your desktop, but want to put the drives in a server elsewhere? Run vblade on your server to serve up a drive over your ethernet to whatever machine you choose. Serve large data storage from a storage server to an application server, without having to buy expensive NAS/SAN devices. Cool stuff. I think I'm going to have to give AoE a try at my house, and see how it works.