Hi, a friend of mine has told me that using a drive with write caching
enabled essentially negates any benefit of soft dependencies. I think I can
see the logic behind that, ie if the drive reorders writes... my question
is: how does one disable write cache on an ata drive? atactl does not seem
to know about enabling/disabling it.

The hardware in question:
Promise ATA100TX2 controller
Western Digital WD1200JB ATA100 (wd0, channel 0 drive 0)
IBM DeskStar 60GXP ATA100 (wd1, channel 1 drive 0)

atactl wd[0-1] identify shows write caching on on both drives. I have been
using softdeps on the IBM drive for a long time now, without knowing about
the cache issue, and have never had any problems because of it. Should I
disable write caching, even though I've never had it cause a problem?

-Sean

-- 
/~\ The ASCII
\ / Ribbon Campaign                   Sean Davis
 X  Against HTML                       aka dive
/ \ Email!