21–30 of 102 posts
Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop... ?
Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.
But in the end it's all about the density of the disk so I'm not sure if you could use a driver to store more data.
Also you will need very accurate positioning of the head. So the drive is also a limiting factor.
I think the largest floppies where 32MB.
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.
I remember when Apple had the soft-eject floppy drives that would only eject after the disk was properly unmounted, and then they even did soft-eject PCMCIA slots. I was surprised when their SD card slots weren't soft-eject.
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.
I remember when Apple had the soft-eject floppy drives that would only eject after the disk was properly unmounted, and then they even did soft-eject PCMCIA slots. I was surprised when their SD card slots weren't soft-eject.
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
There was on the Apple Lisa. Or rather ejecting a disk was something you did in the OS which made sure everything was written/closed before allowing the disk out.
A more accurate title would be "putting an SD card in a floppy disk case"
If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.
What a great point. I am so paranoid now about removing USB drives after I accidentally removed one while it was still writing to the drive (which I had no idea because there was no LED on the drive) and it bricked the entire device. I generally wait until my computer has shutdown completely now before removing any important drives, just to be sure.
I don't even bother to unmount it; what would unmounting add, if the OS can recognize that the device is gone and clean up its mount tables? Is there some filesystem that waits until unmount to recalculate indexes or something?
(Okay, sure, the OS could tell me the disk is in use because I've got an overlay filesystem mounted on top of it, and would I kindly wait forever for that to stop being the case. But screw you, OS, I need this USB. Just send the FUSE server or SMB daemon or whatever a SIGPIPE.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…
To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data There was on the Apple Lisa. Or rather ejecting a disk was something you did in the OS which made sure everything was written/closed before allowing the disk out.
It was definitely confusing to new users: Insert a disk was something which anyone could do, since it only involved simple movement of a physical object, but ejecting it required you to know and understand the OS.
This was quite an "impedance mismatch" between what should ideally be two symmetrical actions, and I remember I had to help out my mother quite a few times :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to han…
> They advertise their size. Everything is under the control of the drive, not the media. They advertise their size as in: tell the drive what to expect. But the drive is in full control of where to write on the disk, and how densely.
As such, you could actually teach an old drive new tricks by coming up with a firmware that used a better encoding scheme, and then encoding the rest of your disk with that scheme.
† (though it ran on the CPU, rather than some microcontroller in the drive. "DOS" stands for Disk Operating System for a reason: a large part of it is a set of routines programs can call to make the CPU micromanage the read-head and stepping motor of the dumb disk-drive controller, with concepts like "files" being a mostly-optional thin wrapper above that, rather than some impenetrable abstraction layer.)