No, you didn't miss anything.
The thing has been discussed occasionally (very occasionally), and I don't
know what the proper response is. According to some people the better
drives make sure that they have enough rotational energy that they can
make sure they get their data written out even after powerdown, but
personally that sounds like science fiction to me (oh, I wouldn't be
surprised if there are some drives that do it, but I'd be surprised if
it's universal).
Of course, Linux itself won't ever shut off the power, so it's more a
matter of "when can you safely say 'System halted.'" than anything else.
The kernel does support some shutdown features, but the disk is not on
that list.
Linus
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