[userbinator]

Linux and Unix in general seems to love huge writeback caching, which is great for speed but horrible for consistency and reliability to power failure and such; on the other hand, Windows flushes the caches more often, providing greater reliability but without as much speed.

That's been my experience, in any case; doing lots of small file operations barely causes any disk activity in Linux, but far more in Windows. Moreover, abruptly cutting power in the middle of that would likely result in far more writes lost on Linux than on Windows.

[spacenick88]

Linux/Unix just trust that if you want something persisted with certainty you'll do an fsync, if you do it will absolutely guarantee you're not losing that. It will absolutely make sure that your filesystem doesn't get corrupted by a power loss but if you didn't fsync your write you had no place believing it was persisted.

Doing that IMHO matches real world use much better. If I do a compile and get a power outage I don't care if some object files get lost. If I do an INSERT in a DB I do care a lot but the DB knows that and will fsync before telling me it succeeded. So making sync explicit gives you both great performance and flexibility.

[userbinator]

Doing that IMHO matches real world use much better. If I do a compile and get a power outage I don't care if some object files get lost.

The real world use is someone working on a document, using Save periodically, and expecting whatever was last saved to survive the next outage, not some arbitrarily old version.

In other words, Windows implicitly fsync's often.