My son has a bad habit of kicking the power cord to my linux box under the desk. I have drives set up as async (default) in fstab. One of my drives is a very large drive and the filesystem check takes a very, very long time. Would changing my drives to sync keep my drives in order so that when they unexpectedly lose power they would not require a filesystem check? Would there be any downsides?

Setting them as sync will slow data transfers dramatically. It would be better to:

1. Convert to a journaled filesystem; journals replay in seconds after an outage
2. Re-dress the cable(s) so it's not kicked out inadvertently
3. Consider a small UPS to prevent outages in general

Heh - the easiest solution is just to tell your kid that each time he kicks out the cord to the PC, he will lose computer privileges for one week. (I'd predict a maximum of one more power outage, tops.)

Regardless, I fully agree that you should be using a journaled file system such as ext3, reiserfs, etc. Over the past couple of years the local power company has run into issues delivering consistent electricity, and there have been several occasions where I discovered when I got back from work only to see blinking clocks, VCR's, etc. So far, my PC's have recovered with any hiccups or data loss whatsoever. Good luck with it