A long time ago FFS did not have ordered writes, resulting in the need
for the fsck at every boot. Then a couple of professors wrote a paper
detailing how ordered writes could fix file system corruption problems.
This is now incorporated in the modern FFS. File system check is now
only needed to recover lost disk space, and no longer needs to run at
every boot (so could be turned off). 0 seconds is faster than 10
seconds, and a journal is not
required. However now that disks are caching data, data loss could
occur. I always turn off the disc cache to avoid this (which slows down
disk writes). Note that ext3
only journals the meta data, so if a journal is also required for
data (otherwise why journal at all?) then something like our LFS
would be needed.