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Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

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Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#41

Post by JupiterMoon »

rikkus wrote: post #39
dcw303 wrote: post #3

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.

On Windows, they're mounted sync by default , so you can just remove them. Of course, if you do so while it's writing, you'll have a problem - though this was the same with floppies. Windows used to require you to 'eject' but doesn't any more, which I think is due to the above. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think that it depends upon file system and the options selected when you format the drive. Windows defaults to options that mean you don't need to 'eject'. However, if you formatted on another OS you can select options that mean a safe unmount is required before yanking the drive out of the socket.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#42

Post by JupiterMoon »

zamalek wrote: post #40
rikkus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows, they're mounted sync by default , so you can just remove them. Of course, if you do so while it's writing, you'll have a problem - though this was the same with floppies. Windows used to require you to 'eject' but doesn't any more, which I think is due to the above. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. As far as I know this has never been enabled by default.

By windows. I'm not sure what parted/gparted defaults to.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#43

Post by digi_owl »

anewhnaccount wrote: post #17

Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop... ?

You also had Sony's Minidisc that in the end could store 1GB in a physical format very similar to a floppy.

This was magnet-optical based though, thus it involved having a laser heating the media before the magnetic arm could flip the bit.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#44

Post by digi_owl »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #42
zamalek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. As far as I know this has never been enabled by default.

By windows. I'm not sure what parted/gparted defaults to.

I think they go with a write cache.

I recall some distros tried to mount USB drives with the sync option back in the early days of USB media.

Problem was that this, in combo with FAT, would basically kill cheap drives lacking wear leveling.

This because every write action was accompanies with a allocation table update. And thus whatever flash cells housed that table would see a massive amount of writes.

Actually i think the mount man file still have a warning about this in the sync option entry.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#45

Post by andrewaylett »

derefr wrote: post #28
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Generally if I'm worried about completing a write, I'll just open a Terminal and type `sync` (with a `&& sudo purge` on OSX), and then, as soon as that returns, yank the drive. 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, t…

Filesystems often have a 'dirty' flag which is cleared as the very last write when unmounting cleanly, to let the OS know whether the filesystem might need to be checked before mounting it next time.

Also, unmounting helps you to be confident that nothing's started doing more IO since you ran sync.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#47

Post by JupiterMoon »

digi_owl wrote: post #44
JupiterMoon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By windows. I'm not sure what parted/gparted defaults to.

I think they go with a write cache. I recall some distros tried to mount USB drives with the sync option back in the early days of USB media. Problem was that this, in combo with FAT, would basically kill cheap drives lacking wear leveling. This because every write action was accompanies with a allocation table update. And thus whatever flash cells housed that table would see a massive amount of writes. Actually i th…

So this implies that even in windows one needs to safely unmount external media that were originally formatted using parted/gparted?

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#48

Post by agumonkey »

digi_owl wrote: post #43
anewhnaccount wrote: post #17

Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop... ?

You also had Sony's Minidisc that in the end could store 1GB in a physical format very similar to a floppy. This was magnet-optical based though, thus it involved having a laser heating the media before the magnetic arm could flip the bit.

The 1GB was later or implied compression IIUC. First models, in the floppy disk era, were 300-400MB. Still would have been a beautiful computer storage device, but Sony sonied.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#49

Post by agumonkey »

Would love to see a whole lot more of repurposed, upgraded old tech. VHS, audio tapes, you name it. My latest thrill is the pico8 project. Low res, 8bit games but with the extra compute power of today, it yields funny results.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#50

Post by pjc50 »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #47
digi_owl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they go with a write cache. I recall some distros tried to mount USB drives with the sync option back in the early days of USB media. Problem was that this, in combo with FAT, would basically kill cheap drives lacking wear leveling. This because every write action was accompanies with a allocation table update. And thus whatever flash cells housed that table would see a massive amount of writes. Actually i th…

So this implies that even in windows one needs to safely unmount external media that were originally formatted using parted/gparted?

No, the write caching is a function of whatever's reading the thing, not the format.
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