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@dalias I don't think the defaults are especially server-specific.

I used to use the defaults on machines with spinning rust disks that were mostly idle -- since each time you spin up / spin down the disk, you're effectively shortening its lifetime.

The defaults can also make sense on a machine with battery backup where disk writes are power-intensive. I actually wound up lengthening them on some laptops, to coalesce small writes into larger IOPs. Not sure if this matters anymore with good SSDs though.

For removable devices specifically, I've seen people use udev to hasten writeback _just for them_ without affecting performance of internal disks, but I haven't personally tried that. (I don't find the flush option to make writes unacceptably slow on removable disks, personally.)