Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 23 Feb 2000 12:10:50 +0000 (GMT) | From | Dale Amon <> | Subject | Re: Of Removable Media |
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I've been listening with interest because I've used systems that claimed to do this, but they used a disk drive with a motorized load/eject and would not eject a disk unless you did an unmount. You could force an eject, but then you got corruption.
It is a basic fact of life in a high performance file system that data is not written when you write to the file, it is written when something occurs to flush it to the media. I believe DOS wrote immediately and thus got around the problem. But floppies are slow, so you take a big performance hit for working directly with the media rather than a buffer.
If you take an unsynced diskette out, it may not only have blocks not written, it may have the entire directory in a bad state.
Even NeXT, which I alluded to above, never got this right. The biggest problem I ever found in the system was the automounting/unmounting of removable media. It could get utterly confused to the point of requiring a reboot to unconfuse the system; or at worst lock the system up so badly that you had to pull the plug.
I have a very low level of faith that systems like this can be made to work. Even if you have multiple disks and keep track of which is in, the disks will all be effectively corrupted unless loaded and synced before rebooting the computer or using the diskette elsewhere.
------------------------------------------------------ Use Linux: A computer Dale Amon, CEO/MD is a terrible thing Village Networking Ltd to waste. Belfast, Northern Ireland ------------------------------------------------------
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