On Monday 19 March 2007 19:49, Joe Georger wrote:
That results in some odd behavior. Tried copying a 1.2 MB file and the command returned instantly. The file appears to be there in its entirety but that's just not possible....
Well, try executing the "sync" command afterwards - async mounted file systems write to the device when they have time to do it, sync mounted file systems write instantly. The default behavior is to write changes after 5 seconds, so when you cp a file to a floppy and wait for said 5 seconds, you'll see the lights turning on, and the actual write back work begins. Since floppies usually are formatted with the FAT file system, sync means that for each sector, a FAT entry is rewritten. So each sector needs a seek to the FAT and back - that takes extremely long (and damages both floppy head and floppy in the long run). The same problem appears with flash based mass storages like USB sticks or SD cards: when mounted sync, the FAT area is rewritten very often, causing significant slowdown and wear of the memory. Don't do it - use async mount and unmount/sync the device before removal. -- Bernd Paysan "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/