With SmartIO, dirty data in the cache is automatically flushed to the disk during normal operations. The dirty data is flushed when the file system is unmounted, or during other operations that require a file system freeze. The dirty data is also flushed periodically at intervals. You can control the interval by configuring the tunable parameters.

See Tuning the writeback caching.

Disabling writeback caching for a file also flushes any write-back dirty data for that file.

In some cases, you may want to manually trigger flushing of the dirty data from the cache to the disk. For example, to ensure data consistency, you would flush the cache before you create an array level snapshot.

You can manually trigger flushing of the dirty data using the following command.

# sfcache flush [-r] {mount_point|directory|file}

Use the -r option to make the selection recursive.