[CentOS] 4.4/64-bit Supermicro/ Nvidia RAID [thanks]

>
> Yes it does if you have a journaling filesystem. For example, 
> fsync/fsyncdata calls get special treatment on filesystems like ext3. 
> When the filesystem containing the files on which fsync is called and 
> it is mounted data=journal, those writes hit the filesystem journal 
> first after which the fsync gets to say OK. After that the kernel will 
> write from the journal to the rest of the disk at its leisure.

I thought file system journals like ext3 were just used for the file 
system metadata?   inode allocations and directory updates and so forth, 
not actual user data?.  

If I understand what you're suggesting, if I write 200MB of data then 
fsync, my -data- is written to the journal, then later written to the 
actual file system?


anyways, I seriously doubt we could convince operations at our 
manufacturing facilities to add ramdrives to their mostly HP servers.  I 
don't even know if they'd fit in the blade servers most commonly used.