> 
> > DOW will help the situation in the near future on FreeBSD (and I
> > would hope NetBSD/OpenBSD also.)
> 
> What is DOW?
> 
Delayed ordered writes.  There are some patents on that scheme (I think), but
there is work underway to implement something with similar results: a
consistant filesystem with almost async metadata.  It means that you can
loose recent changes, but you will be unlikely to end up with something
that can't be fixed with fsck (unlike true async.)

John