Nonvolatile write buffers speed up disk writes by writing blocks to a non-volatile RAM buffer immediately
Non-volatile RAM: battery backed up RAM or flash memory
Even if power fails, the data is safe and will be written to disk when power returns
Controller then writes to disk whenever the disk has no other requests or request has been pending for some time
Database operations that require data to be safely stored before continuing can continue without waiting for data to be written to disk
Writes can be reordered to minimize disk arm movement
Log disk – a disk devoted to writing a sequential log of block updates
Used exactly like nonvolatile RAM
Write to log disk is very fast since no seeks are required
No need for special hardware (NV-RAM)
File systems typically reorder writes to disk to improve performance