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Friendly reminder to never forcebly shutdown your PC
(lemmy.world)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That’s not how PCs work. Once you’ve downloaded the data, it’s on your hard drive, not the RAM. This sounds very much like you’ve experienced hard drive failure.
This is incorrect too. The OS buffers writes to drives for performance, a portion is kept in memory and flushed to disk when possible. A sudden power loss can easily result in a partial write.
That said a drive failure is also possible.
The filesystems journal will be the source of truth.
The buffer is flushed every 6 seconds. OP was pulling down 44GB/7200sec = 6MB/s. OP would have only lost 36MB to disk caching.
If it was a single 44GB file and OP turned off less than 6 seconds after it finished, then it could have been caching. But that’s very unlikely.