Re:Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday February 26, 2016 @08:26AM
(#11181213)
Ooh, it'd be cool if you could do the same thing for USB drives. Perhaps some sort of claw or magnetic mechanism could hold the drive in place.
This makes me wonder what those two holes in the shroud of USB A style connectors are for. After a bit of googling it looks as if they are to provide a bit of tension against removal. I'm sure you could repurpose them to lock the usb drive into a USB port.
Some office ape is likely to rip the port out...
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.