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Soft updates delays writes.
By delaying the writes, the writes can be sequenced so that interrelated data is always written out consistently.
Thus, if the sequence is interrupted, your hard disk is left in better condition than if you had done the writes in the original sequence.
Soft updates basically changes the order that writes occur in. While doing this, it can sometimes combine writes that would have otherwise been done seperately, resulting in a performance increase.
The draw back is that if a crash occurs, the capacity of the hard drive is reduced. (The locations of the most recent disk writes are literaly lost.)
The repair process will find this lost space and return it to the free space, so this dimished capacity is temporary.
The actual data will still be gone, but only the most recently written data.
Everything that remains will be usuable. (from a file system level point of view) This may not be the case without soft updates.
Long down times for disk repair are no fun.
I suspect you will probably be better off with it than without it.
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