You can't get enough up votes. Crashing because an I/O operation fails? That's sounds like simply a bug in the software. The developer didn't handle an error properly, and QA didn't test the software on an environment with elevated I/O activity. I've done enough code reviews over the years and seen enough ignoring errors from read(), ignoring malloc() returning null, not handling exceptions, etc. Good developers give a shit but many just don't care at all and think crashing or exiting when you're out of disk space is just fine.