On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 23:22 -0400, John E. Perry wrote:
The lights stay on except while writing on all three of mine. I've been running "sync" to clear all write buffers before I removed mine, since 10.0 (now at 10.1). Does this not work as I understood it? Is it now unnecessary, as some of these posts seem to have implied?
Yes. Most newer kernel support is aware of removable EEPROM storage. They know to synchronize write buffers immediately. So sync is rather redundant _except_ as a prompt verification that the write has been completed. I.e., the buffers are being flushed _immediately_ for removable EEPROM storage, _regardless_ of whether you run "sync" or not. All "sync" gives you now is a pause before a return prompt until the buffers are flushed (possibly a slight added priority -- but not likely anything significant). Furthermore, the UDF filesystem -- unlike most random access block filesystems such as FAT, NTFS, Ext2/3, etc... -- was designed with [re-]writable, removable media in mind (among other benefits UDF offers, such as versus ISO9660 for read-only/pre-mastering). So if your removable storage uses UDF, instead of FAT32, it has extra protections. Now I don't know how much of UDF is completely implemented in the Linux kernel 2.4 and 2.6 implementation -- but Linux's UDF certainly better than the minimalistic and read-only implementation in Windows XP, or most of the bundled UDF write drivers these days. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------- Illegal Immigration = "Representation Without Taxation" -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com