>>It's still Friday over here (and it's been a looooong one), but why should the controller's caching matter at all? If the info is not physically written yet, it doesn't matter - any decent controller would immediately return the fresh info from the cache, not moving any of its heads (it has seven heads, but it's not a dragon - it's a disk). I guess that's also quicker to retrieve it from the cache - wasn't it the purpose of the cache in the first place?
>>
>>OTOH, I wouldn't trust a disk which doesn't read its own (write or any)cache.
>
>This is a common problem with databases...even high end disk controllers do things this way.

There's nothing safe in this world...