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by hyc_symas 1082 days ago
Every HDD since the 1980s has guaranteed atomic sector writes:

> Currently all hard drive/SSD manufacturers guarantee that 512 byte sector writes are atomic. As such, failure to write the 106 byte header is not something we account for in current LMDB releases. Also, failures of this type should result in ECC errors in the disk sector - it should be impossible to successfully read a sector that was written incorrectly in the ways you describe.

Even in extreme cases, the probability of failure to write the leading 128 out of 512 bytes of a sector is nearly nil - even on very old hard drives, before 512-byte sector write guarantees. We would have to go back nearly 30 years to find such a device, e.g.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_quantumQuaroductManual...

Page 23, Section 2.1 "No damage or loss of data will occur if power is applied or removed during drive operation, except that data may be lost in the sector being written at the time of power loss."

  From the specs on page 15, the data transfer rate to/from the platters is
 1.25MB/sec, so the time to write one full sector is 0.4096ms; the time to
 write the leading 128 bytes of the sector is thus 1/4 of that: 0.10ms. You
 would have to be very very unlucky to have a power failure hit the drive
 within this .1ms window of time. Fast-forward to present day and it's simply
 not an issue.
^ above quoted from https://lists.openldap.org/hyperkitty/list/openldap-devel@op...
2 comments

Doesn't help when you work with pages :-)

Assume 512 sectors ( I know those are rare ), but I don't think that there is any guarantees that 4KB page would be:

* Written atomically * Written in a particular order

Even memory ordering guarantees within sector boundaries are sufficient, and something the kernel could provide on its own.
Also doesn't help when you are running on virtual / networked hardware. Nothing ensure that what you think is a sector write would actually align properly with the hardware.
The design and guarantees of the virtualized hardware provide that guarantee. I've worked on several such products. They all guarantee atomic sector writes (typically via copy-on-write).