control over write buffering

[nponeccop]

Sometimes it is useful to have large (gigabytes) memory buffers and/or long buffering times (e.g. flush if buffer is full or once an hour). And sometimes data is so important that they must be flushed as soon as possible.

[DavidR91]

Seconded. Using node-dirty to store data during conversion between two formats (60K records). The write performance is inconsequential so it would have been nice to flush every ~10K records (rather than needing 1.5GB+ RAM during the process)