Raw Partitions and Oracle

In the oracle manuals they say that raw partitions are quicker than using files system for tablespaces etc. because it bypass's the overhead of the file system. But I thought that because unix file systems (we are using HP 9000 - 570 using 10.20) buffer data before it writes it to disk, that using a file system would be quicker since the database server would not have to wait for disk access. I thought that the reason for using raw partitions was more for data integrity i.e. the database server would not loose data if the machine crashes and the data is still in the buffer and not yet written to disk. I am missing something

Declan O'Reilly Received on Sat Mar 07 1998 - 00:00:00 CST