Soft updates and power failure

[Pete French]

> I have encountered the same problem in the past, as softupdates use a 
> memory cache for performance.  You can get around this by setting the 

Even with the cache it still guarantees the disc is not left in
an inconsistent state doesnt it ? i.e. it only flushes the cache
in consistent chunks to the drive.

> You should note that on heavily used drives this will probably give a 
> performance hit.

Sync gives a *horrible* performance hit, and I don't believe that it makes the
data any more likely to be consistent than running softupdates. Indeed
when I did some experiments it was actually worse.

-bat.