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Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

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Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#51

Post by PhasmaFelis »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
kalleboo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was great until your Mac decided that it didn't want to unmount that disk for some reason. And then you got out a paperclip.

I actually remember frantically searching through my uncle's Mac manual after I inserted a corrupt boot disk (or possibly not a boot disk at all) and then couldn't get the thing to boot, which meant I couldn't use the soft eject.

Fortunately the paperclip trick was in there.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#52

Post by amelius »

josteink wrote: post #13
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.

> 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…

> The difference between then and now is that new computers have enormous amounts of memory and use it to provide write-back caching.

Also, not syncing to disk immediately can improve the lifetime of flash media, which wasn't a concern in the old days.

However, I'm somewhat disappointed by current filesystems not using journaling to make it possible to pull out a USB drive without harm (other than losing the latest writes).

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#53

Post by ttctciyf »

josteink wrote: post #13
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.

> 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…

> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it

My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac.

I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that looked something like a game. It wasn't, and I went to hit the ... wait, there's no eject button?

After a fruitless few minutes during which I failed to notice the eject key on the keyboard (of all places!) I eventually opted for tweezers, and gently teased the floppy out of the drive.

Imagine my surprise when I restarted the Mac to find it was unable to start, having apparently completely forgotten about it's own HD! The thing had to go back for servicing before it would even boot properly, iirc.

My reputation as the house's resident computer expert was severely impacted, needless to say.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#54

Post by mike_hock »

josteink wrote: post #13
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.

> 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…

We also had that fixed with CDs/DVDs when the OS could lock the drive and handle the eject button any way it liked.

I didn't quite like the way Linux handled this though, not allowing the disk to be ejected as long as any file descriptors were still open, which meant you had to hunt down the processes keeping them open.

But it would be extremely helpful for writable media like flash to be able to do full write-back caching and only flush the cache when the eject button is pressed, then EBADF any further reads or writes to any open file descriptors.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#55

Post by fit2rule »

josteink wrote: post #35
viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just remembered that even hard drives at some point had similar issues. Remember to park your heads before power off!

Good catch! I had completely forgotten about that one. For those completely oblivious to this: This was actually not about getting data written to disk, but to physically protect the drive from its own mechanical construction. The "park" command would cause the harddrive to move its magnetic read and write-heads away from the internal platters, so that when it was powered down and the disks stopped spinning, the plat…

I still type "sync;sync;sync" before I unmount something.

(This used to be how you'd tell the tape-spooler to rewind..)

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#56

Post by minikites »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
kalleboo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was great until your Mac decided that it didn't want to unmount that disk for some reason. And then you got out a paperclip.

Before resorting to a paper clip, the trick was to reboot while holding the mouse button. This still works today with CDs if the CD is damaged and the OS gets caught up trying to read it.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#57

Post by pvdebbe »

I would like to see the 3.5" floppy do a comeback, for instance as a 1TB+ flash drive. It is large enough that you can comfortably handle it physically and label it, maybe it could be a small throwback to the age of floppies and zip drives.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#58

Post by oh_sigh »

josteink wrote: post #13
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.

> 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…

You're right - the only solution would be a captive eject button, which did all of the write resolutions before allowing the disc to physically eject. And that would come with other usability problems, like users getting angry when they push eject and their card doesn't come out immediately.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#59

Post by OneOneOneOne »

esaym wrote: post #8

Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ

That would be about 80E3 floppys. Assuming a transfer rate of 500kbyte/second the peak data rate for the array would be 40E9 byte/second!

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#60

Post by whyagaindavid »

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…

I use this bash script to a umount with a shortcut key. Using KDE. (bad formatting in hn)

#!/bin/bash for i in `ls /media/$USER` do cd /media/$USER umount $i done

ls /media/$USER |grep -v cdrom0 |grep -v cdrom> /tmp/disk_status file=/tmp/disk_status if [ ! -s $file ]; then kdialog --passivepopup "Nothing Mounted " 1 else kdialog --passivepopup "Mounted devices: `cat /tmp/disk_status`" 2 fi

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