Hi KennyR
with all the respect . . .have you taken in consideration that your "esoteric" theory, could be the reason of your disk failure?
Onestly, i've never heard before a so "bizarre" theory and i know gazillions of users that uses IB2.3 with SFS from a life.
As already said, SFS isn't the best for diskcaching, but doesn't freeze/crash nothing if correctly configurated.
AddBuffer KennyR, beleive me :-)
Ciao