Dear Slashdot comment flood: I didn't write the summary in the Slashdot story. The submitter did. I know the disks themselves don't handle an fsync(). I know fsync() only tells the operating system to flush. This script tests whether fsync works end-to-end. A database in userspace can only fsync... it can't send special IDE or SCSI "flush your buffers" commands to the disks. So that's what I care