On Wed, 27 May 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
I would be most intrigued to see what a hardware lock and soft-eject for a USB
key would look like.
Eject would require fairly precise fit for a solenoid follower around the
perimeter.
Are the square holes in the USB-A top and bottom side standardized?
Are they strong enough to discourage ham-fisted users? (needs to also
ba a flashing light surrounding the port!)
Would red/green lights be enough to help mitigate the problem?
Win7 does sometimes erroneously report a device in use when all
application programs that accessed it have been closed. I am unaware of
how to query "WHICH program claims to still be using it?"
But the memory leaks and a few other problems are enough that WIN7 can
benefit from periodic restarts. It, at least MY copies, are definitely
NOT a permanently ON OS.
Fortunately, there now exist robust filesystems which ensure that partial
writes are not visible and that only the last few seconds of uncommitted data
still in the write queue is lost. Unfortunately, these tend not to be used much
because they're "slow"[0] and/or because it's on removable media formatted with
a joke filesystem because of Windows.
A joke operating system doesn't provide much CHOICE of which filesystems
to use.
And it dates back decades, even to "advice" columns in magazines
recommending to turn VERIFY off in DOS.
(NOTE: for those unfamiliar: "VERIFY" (both DOS and Int13h) was not a read
after write compare of content; it merely confirmed that each sector that
was written was readable.)
[0] For anybody who values throughput over durability, may I recommend
/dev/null for the ultimate in performance?
