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Comment by mike_esspe | Hacker News Reader

Laptops are vulnerable to this problem, if you don't know about it.

On my notebook I've lost a partition with Crucial M4. OS hanged, I did a hard reset and after reboot discovered data loss.

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I got an Intel SSD (G1 80GB) in my laptop to do OS development (drivers), which incidentally is a use case that requires lots of hard resets. Never had any problems with it, and it's been through dozens if not hundreds of hard reset cycles. In fact I got the SSD specifically because I didn't want to be spinning up/down a disk that much, and laptops tend not to have reset buttons (they really need one, IMHO.)

Those tend to be very safe hard resets from a drive perspective. First of all, you're not losing power, so even though there's a reset, the drive firmware maintained power. Secondly, I'm guessing you see far more hard locks and manual resets than random, sudden reboots - and if that's the case, then the drive firmware probably didn't even notice. By the time you press reset, an eternity has passed and any ongoing activities have long finished.

I can imagine a software-fault causing drive-level problems if the drive has a large cache and a broken fsync, or if the bios does some kind of unsafe hard drive reset very quickly after starting.

In any case, it's probably more likely to be file-system level reliability you'd need in the face of driver instability.

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