nodatainlog mount option

Use the nodatainlog mode on systems with disks that do not support bad block revectoring. Usually, a VxFS file system uses the intent log for synchronous writes. The inode update and the data are both logged in the transaction, so a synchronous write only requires one disk write instead of two. When the synchronous write returns to the application, the file system has told the application that the data is already written. If a disk error causes the metadata update to fail, then the file must be marked bad and the entire file is lost.

If a disk supports bad block revectoring, then a failure on the data update is unlikely, so logging synchronous writes should be allowed. If the disk does not support bad block revectoring, then a failure is more likely, so the nodatainlog mode should be used.

A nodatainlog mode file system is approximately 50 percent slower than a standard mode VxFS file system for synchronous writes. Other operations are not affected.