Disk write cache corruption on an external hard disk

Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.

Disabling a write cache would not help you with the problem you are having. Besides the write cache is on the hard drive and operates independently of the operating system. But nothing can protect you from disconnected an external drive improperly, and if the drive is in the process of being written to, and the problem comes from directory corruption, not file corruption, as in the case you have described, disabling a write cache would not have made any difference.
For the future the magic word is: Backups.
< Edited by Host >

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Disk write cache corruption on an external hard disk

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