[64studio-devel] saving to floppy - why save and unmount

[Pete Crook]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. You are absolutely right. When Daniel replied saying it should be physically copying I did more tests and low and behold about 30 secs after the copy operation the floppy light comes on and it physically saves.
I researched some more and again you are right. the /etc/fstab file has to be edited and one of the default options on the floppy line has to be changed to sync (from nosync I think). Then it will be physically saved at the time of the original copy operation. However I am still looking into why it takes about 20secs to physically save an 80KB file!!!

Can you remember where you saw those usb thumb drives? I had the same idea a couple of weeks ago but could find no one selling really low capacity ones cheap enough. For the third time you are right - that is the way it needs to go, and the better youngsters in schools will have their own anyway. 
Thanks for your help, and I would be grateful if you could remember where you saw the thumb drives.

cheers

Peter Crook


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Message: 8
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 19:06:34 -0500
From: mmmmna <mmmmna at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [64studio-devel] saving to floppy - why save and unmount
To: 64studio-devel at 64studio.com
Message-ID:
	<78f3cb240703161706v56a8e777x78f15e0fc5bd423 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Pete,

Another issue that comes to the fore would be user habits.

Microsoft operating systems (personally, I started at DOS 3.0) teach
us that when the floppy drive access light goes out, your system is
done using the floppy drive. Other operating systems have different
requirements (operating methods) than Microsoft. With Linux, disk
caching for floppy disk drives is very common - I'd say that floppy
caching was default and has been default for quite a while.

Most distributions I've used are configured write to have the floppy
write cache (buffered data) be immediately committed (completed) only
when the umount command is given. If you had any cached floppy writes,
simply ejecting will leave the data in the buffer after the floppy is
removed. I believe this caching effort can be reconfigured, but I
personally like the caching more often than not. Something in
/etc/fstab or /etc/mtab should be edited (I might be mistaken).

Just out of curiosity, I've seen 5 packs of 32 meg USB thumb drives
selling for about the same as a single 10 pack of floppy disks; would
there be any possibility to use thumb drives or does the target system
have no USB?

HTH



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