Comment by toast0

> While it’s important to make this explicit, at what point do we just assume a high-reliability UPS is table stakes?

Several years after they become commercially available?

My experience with small UPSes is they tend to cook the batteries and you don't find out until they switch the load and the battery doesn't hold up.

Large facility UPSes tend to do better, but automatic transfer switches have a tendancy to fail ocassionally. If you're hosted in many locations, it's not unusual to have a couple ATS failures per decade.

All that said, unexpected power loss is certainly one reason that writes may be lost, but OSes crash too. Disk firmware can also crash, but if thst bricks the disk, writes in progress don't really matter. Sometimes cabling fails. Or you get a uncorrectable ECC error (which will typically cause an OS panic... unless you're running a very fancy OS, but if it's in dirty disk backed page, even a fancy OS wouldn't save you)

Plenty of applications don't need or want to pay the cost for full commit to disk, but calling something durable when it's not committed to disk is inaccurate.

And that's before we get into the whole thing where the OS and the disk like to return success when things haven't quite finished.