> > 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.