I guess I've been living under a rock, because I had the souvenir that disks with volatile write caches did have a small power bank, able to sustain the disk for the few seconds it needed to flush its caches (what it called a BBU?)
Which leads me to another question, should it really be the responsibility of each component to gracefully handle a random, instantaneous power loss?
Couldn't we have a small power bank on the motherboard keeping, say, 2 seconds of power and signaling emergency shutdown to components?
In a sense, that is very similar to sending a SIGTERM to a process to allow it to gracefully stop.
Which leads me to another question, should it really be the responsibility of each component to gracefully handle a random, instantaneous power loss?
Couldn't we have a small power bank on the motherboard keeping, say, 2 seconds of power and signaling emergency shutdown to components?
In a sense, that is very similar to sending a SIGTERM to a process to allow it to gracefully stop.