It really looks sometimes like a conspiracy exists against write-protected
devices.
Finding an external disk enclosure (USB, eSATA) that has write protection is
very hard.
Same with protected USB flash drives.
Photo flash media (CF, SD) used to have write protection pins or switch -
but
now it gets replaced with microSD that has no protection switch.
All DVD drives on sale today have write ability, and again, no easy way
for user to disable writing.
Most of write-once optical disks available on sale decay in few years, thus
pushing
users to back up their data on hard drives or… in the “cloud”.
MO disks, known for long storage life, are no more available for sale where
I live.
And have you noticed? All new Android tablets have only microSD slots,
though their dimensions easily allow the full size, camera compatible SD.
As if computer worms and viruses are ruling the [consumer] storage
industry…
– pa
wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>>Yes, there are tables on the disk that include things like the last time
> it was mounted, and whether or not he volume was cleanly unmounted, and
> so on. Those things get written even if no files are written.
>
> Isn’t it stupid? While Win7 has become a bit saner in that respect,
> Windows XP/2003 has been very retarded. I don’t know if there was any
> upper bound for dirty data age, but so far as I can tell, no matter how
> long a USB stick was sitting idle, if you unplug it without going through
> Safe Removal, next time you’ll be greeted with “want to check your drive”
> dialog. Or Win2003 will report delayed write error.
>
> Also, somebody at Microsoft thought (“a feature somebody got promoted
> for”) it would be a good idea to create a file just when the disk is
> plugged in, to test the drive speed or something, perhaps to see if it’s a
> good target for ReadyBoost. Then delete it instantly. Every frigging time,
> just for the hell of it. Is anybody watching those engineers?
>
>