This is going to be the fist in a series of random tests (completely unscientific) that I perform on an x86 machine with Solaris 10 installed.
This week, it consists of pulling out an IDE drive having just told StarOffice to save an open file. No preparation, no telling Solaris what was going to happen, simply pull the drive whilst Solaris was up and running. I can’t think why you might want to do this, but it seemed like a fun test. First, the power cable was pulled out, then the data cable.
The test results: you guessed it, when the drive was pulled, no requests for anything that wasn’t already in main memory hung. This included StarOffice hanging, waiting for the destination drive to be reachable before it could let me try and save the file to disk.
As soon as the drive was connected back up again (data cable first, then power), the system was happy again, and StarOffice proceeded to save the file!
I should point out that the disks was not part of any RAID configuration 