>I don't think anyone considers IDE to be deployed in that environment, other than possibly as a basic boot device.

Agreed - but it is used extensively in W2KPro, and since W2K (like NT) is pretty much all the same code regardless of "version", MS wouldn't want its enterprise offerings viewed as "guilty by association".
>>

>I created the problem by abnormal termination of the machine - Win2K does force a write to disk, and unless there is a whole lot of seeking going on, it should take under a second to write 2MB. Most current drives will move at least 4MB/sec to the platter, with full-stroke seeks taking well under 50ms, and average latency around 8.33ms for a 7200RPM drive. I'm not currently up-to-date on the exact behavior of the newest Ultra ATA specs, but the last I heard, it was not doing any significant I/O scheduling; last I heard, it could defer a write if a read request occurred while a write was pending in it's buffer if the direction of movement of the head would reach it first, and writes were sequential - writes happened in the order that they were received to preserve the state of the media, and writes did not defer if a read required the head to move 'away' from the earliest pending write. I can try to find the ANSI X3T10 web site if you need it, it used to be hosted by NCR, which is
>no longer a player in the marketplace.
>
As long as the power's staying on, it shouldn't be an issue.

Like you, I'm concerned about power-off behaviour under OS control. I kill APM and BIOS power saving features on every desktop I get my fingers on. I brought this up mainly because a client just got some Dell Optiplex workstations running W2KPro; on these machines, the power goes off less than a quarter of a second after the GUI "Windows is shutting down..." message disappears from the screen.

I'd heard that drive buffers had gotten smarter than the pure read-only track buffering they used to do, but I had no idea of the details. Thanks for the update.