[LMB] AKICOTL: Technical question OT:

[Mark Allums]

James wrote:
> If you need to carry > 4GB files around, there's nothing to do but use
> a good filesystem like NTFS. Generally you can yank it out since
> Windows disables write caching to USB disks so it shouldn't matter,
> other than the filesystem being marked as "dirty" because NTFS never
> had a chance to properly unmount.

That turns out not to be the case, I recently have learned.  Windows XP 
classifies disks as removable and non-removable.  Newer flash drives are 
all removable. (Early models may not be.)  Most high-capacity hard 
drives are non-removable.  Lower-capacity hard drives can be either, it 
depends on the firmware of the drive.

It seems that XP doesn't allow drives classed as removable to be 
formatted with NTFS.  NTFS "volumes" are mounted with write caching 
enabled.  It is possible to turn off write caching for a drive, but 
Windows regards it as anathema, and it has a tendency not to "stick". 
Trying to turn off write caching for NTFS is futile--it will not stay 
off permanently.

I would have preferred for Microsoft to have used better judgment in 
making these rules, but we are stuck with their decisions.  A modern 
file system without archaic limits, but user-friendly, appears to be too 
much to ask for.  UNIX/Linux/etc. is not much better.  It is exceedingly 
difficult to format a USB flash drive in Linux.  For me, at least.  In 
Debian.  And one wouldn't want to use a modern file system with it, 
anyway.  Un*x is even more anal about write caching than Windows.  Sigh.

(Splitting files is undesirable.  The whole purchase of a large and 
expensive 8G flash drive was in order to avoid this.)

--Mark Allums