Possible data write corruption problem on Linux

Andy Tai writes “According to this report on sr5tech.com, current GNU/Linux file systems (such as ext3 and reiserfs) suffer from possible data corruption on IDE drives with write-back caching turned on. Even though these file systems are journaled, the IDE controller may fool the OS into thinking an I/O operation has been completed even though the data are still in the drive buffer waiting to be written to disk. The problem becomes more severe when RAID is used–since multiple drives are used, the chances of corruption increases significantly. The authors did numerous power-cycling experiments in single drive and multiple drive (RAID) setups to demonstrate the problem, where data corruption makes ext3 or reiserfs volumes inconsistent or even unmountable.”