Thank you!

It's a shame AmigaOS' volume system never caught on. It would have solved the problems the article describes re. drive letter assumptions: "Assign A: DH0:" - Problem solved!

I feel really old now.

I really miss how you could assign drive names to disks too, so you might have some reference to a file on a particular disk and it would prompt you to insert that specific disk (into any convenient floppy drive) and if you got the wrong disk it would know and ask you again.

Otoh I don't miss all the swapping between the 5 floppies that SAS C compiler came on before I finally got my hands on a humongous 40 megabyte hard drive.

Also remember how the drives would click every second to check if you had actually inserted anything and how there was some freeware anticlick program on one of the Fish disks that reconfigured to somehow work without the annoying clicky noise. (Or you could just feed it a disk). Fun times.

So... recently I've started using a physical box running Debian for some retro computing work (dd'ing images etc.) and I have a need to use a USB floppy drive.

I think there is some daemon running in the background trying to automount stuff, as the USB drive constantly clicks when empty just like the Amiga used to.

Very irritating.

Could be. For the record, my USB drive (and I'm running Debian too), doesn't do that. Part of the desktop environment, perhaps?