> So what do *you* do when you disable write caching on one of your systems? One of my posts had something about deleting mails from the mail queue...3ware 750x/850x do not have battery power backup. I tried to rely on data=journal with ext3 but under heavy load the box would crash rather frequently. XFS was plain disastrous. Maybe try to get as many spindles as you can and go for write caching off with XFS + sync as it appears your streams are rather important and see whether it meets your needs but speed wise and data integrity wise. The only hope under Linux appears to be reiser4 but that has to wait for a while...