When disk write-caching is enabled for an host bus adapter (HBA) that contains any volume managed by Volume Manager, data corruption may occur. This will be especially true for features like Dirty Region Logging (DRL) and RAID5 logging, but also holds true for simple volumes. Volume Manager employs an algorithm that relies on the assumption that data is actually written to the disk when the disk driver returns a write status. When disk write-caching is enabled, writes may be held temporarily before being actually written to disk. This defeats Volume Manager's algorithm and can lead to data corruption. Other unpredictable behavior may also result if disk write-caching is enabled on the HBA.

To avoid the possibility of data corruption, disable disk write-caching on the HBA for disks containing volumes managed by VERITAS Volume Manager.