Re: Floppy's and CD's: GIMME THAT BACK!

Quoting Bill Wisse <[email protected]>:

> On Tuesday 14 October 2003 15:09, Jeff Albro wrote:
> > Annoyance:
> >
> > That floppies, CD's or other removable meadia need to be unmounted.  The
> > OS has no business telling you what you can and can't do in the physical
> > world.  If you press eject, it should eject, and the OS should deal with
> > it gracefully.
> >
> > -Jeff
> 
> I find that annoying at times as well ( only when I forget to unmount).
> However there must be a damned good reason for that mount and unmount .
> I'm not to sure what it is ( maybe some ( reasonable) person on this list can
> 
> explain.)
> I believe it has something to do with multi user system, but then I could be
> 
> wrong.

It has to do with I/O buffering. Write to disks, especially floppies, are 
extremely slow. So what Unix systems do is write to memory, then as the system 
gets less busy it eventually writes to the disk. What it means from the user's 
point of view is the command line prompt comes back immediately as if the write 
had been instantaneous.

BTW that's not just Linux that does that, windows NT does the same as well, and 
I've corrupted quite a few floppies by popping the diskette out after the 
command prompt had returned, but before the system had finished writing to the 
disk (I should have been watching the little green light!).

At least with CDs and Zip drives, the system controls the pop button and won't 
let you eject until the drive is unmounted. With floppies the eject button is 
mechanical, so you're almost assured to destroy the floppy. That's a great 
incentive to remember how to do it right :^)


> -- 
> Greetings from
> 
> /bill at 169 west , 19 south.  
> 
> Disclaimer: Any errors in spelling, tact, or fact are
> transmission errors."
> 
>      
> 
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