title: Why do my Cassandra hints files keep getting corrupted
body: <p>We're running multiple Kubernetes clusters, which run Cassandra.
  Our usual procedure when doing a rolling restart of the Cassandra pods is to log into each and submit a <code>nodetool drain</code> and then trigger a recreation of that pod. But often when the pods restart we get errors like </p>
  
  <pre><code>ERROR [HintsDispatcher:2] 2017-08-07 11:09:32,489 HintsDispatchExecutor.java:243 - Failed to dispatch hints file 5fdd139d-4465-4825-85ef-f380bddcb67d-1502100535128-1.hints: file is corrupted ({})
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Those corrupt files prevent Cassandra from starting. Is there a way to tell Cassandra to flush all buffers and stop writing, before stopping it, to ensure there are no corrupt files left behind?</p>