Comment Re:man 3 fsync (Score 2) 63
Normally, writes to disk can't be confirmed faster than one per full revolution of the platters. Thus, a 7200 RPM disk can not perform more than 7200 transactions a minute.
It can perform transactions at a much higher rate than that by using group commit, and any performance-sensitive system (including journaling file systems) will indeed use group commit. But the mean latency for any one commit does end up being limited to the time to perform half a disk rotation, and that's what non-volatile DIMMs are about - reduced I/O latency.