Losing what is in the RAM cache would still be data loss and covered by my comment.
I have seen USB flash drives get corrupted by unplugging during data access. Even right here on this list.
As you say, it would be nice if the CD-ROM drive button (CD-RW drive if a non-writeable media is inserted) would issue unmount and eject the disk. Don't know if anyone is working on this. I do recall a point where the feature was added to GUI filebrowsers and right-click menus to initiate a software eject command. Somebody thought it was important or annoying that we couldn't do that in Linux.
Brian Kelsay
Jonathan Hutchins <> 01/13/05 11:40AM >>>
On Thursday 13 January 2005 07:34 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:
In order to streamline the OS, all drives are treated the same. You can't pull a hotswap SCSI or eject a CD until it is unmounted. You definitely don't want to eject a CD-R when you are in the middle of burning, so the burning process locks the drive. If you remove a USB HDD or flash drive without unmounting, you risk data loss or corruption.
This is pretty easy to understand if you do a little bit of work with a floppy, which _can_ be ejected while it's still mounted. <snip> Stick it back in the original machine, unmount it. Watch the blinkenlight. Oooh, that's it, it's writing the data from RAM cache to the disk! _That's_ why you have to unmount drives before you physically disconnect them!
On Thursday 13 January 2005 12:01 pm, Brian Kelsay wrote:
As you say, it would be nice if the CD-ROM drive button (CD-RW drive if a non-writeable media is inserted) would issue unmount and eject the disk. Don't know if anyone is working on this.
It has been implemented at the distro level by at least SuSE through a system known as SubFS -- I haven't seen it anywhere else yet but I'm sure it's on it's way everywhere.
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Brian Kelsay -
Jason Clinton