>One thing not doing synchronous inode write buys you is a bit of
>speed.  This is why Linux seems to win doing filesystem intensive
>stuff.

It's worth noting that there's an async option to mount (mount -o async) that
will make all I/O on that filesystem done asynchronously.  It's not clear to
me at a glace if it actually _does_ anything, but it might be worth using
if you were doing something that required lots of directory updates (for
example, doing a restore on a filesystem).

--Ken