I hear ya on the benefits of SCSI over ATA/IDE.

My concern is that this appears to be a fairly serious OS-level issue (hopefully MS is working on it?) As you pointed out, turning off lazy writes is not ideal from a performance standpoint, especially if doing so is not "sticky".

With servers I'd be concerned that critical server-based apps might run into this issue as well. OTOH, if it only manifests itself on shutdown, and servers run 24/7, then it might never arise there, as the server *always* has enough time to eventually write the data to disk.

Modern OSs are supposed to issue an OS-level, system-wide "FLUSH" at shutdown; this *should* prevent these sorts of problems. It apppears that this is not the case for W2K and ATA/IDE. Unless...

Question for you: In your testing, were you using machines that not only shut down, but powered off under OS control when shutdown was "complete"? These days, some ATA drives have buffers of 2MB or more, and I'm wondering if the drive is getting powered off before it can fully write its local buffer contents out to disk.