Blocking access to removable drives that haven't spun up yet

Posted Oct 12, 2011 7:09 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263)
In reply to: Blocking access to removable drives that haven't spun up yet by smoogen
Parent article: A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Yes, that is pretty standard, and I guess that the drive just lets the controller wait for the data. Problem is that CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives doesn't do that, they send a no-disc (or something to that effect) instead, even if it is spinning up the disc.

I have no idea why it's done that way, it seems rather silly when the drive knows that data is (probably) on the way.

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Blocking access to removable drives that haven't spun up yet

Posted Oct 15, 2011 0:11 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I'm not sure which drives we're talking about, but I've had CD drives for about 10 years that spin down after a period of inactivity, and when the client sends a read command, the drive spins up while the command executes.

However, when you load a disk, before it spins up and the drive otherwise loads the disk, commands fail immediately.

I don't know any reason a "green" drive would be different.

But it does seem like an obvious idea to have the drive hold off on completing any commands while loading is taking place.