Why does it take so long to write to floppy?

CodeWarrior · 08-07-2003, 09:41 PM

Well I can mount my floppy drive(fd0) with no problems as expected to /mnt/floppy. Many times I want to copy files to the floppy from my harddrive so I copy files to /mnt/floppy. When I issue a command to do this there is like a 6 or more second delay until the system reads the floppy drive and writes my files to it. Why is this?

slakmagik · 08-08-2003, 12:14 AM

Well, floppies are slow and maybe you're also running several other processes at the time. I suppose you could 'nice' whatever process writing to floppy is to a higher priority? I suspect writing to floppy is just low on the totem pole. Usually, it seems the files don't actually get written until I unmount a floppy, though. But six seconds does seem a bit excessive, either way. Hopefully it isn't anything hardware related.

CodeWarrior · 08-08-2003, 10:38 PM

Thanks, thats a good idea, I will nice the process with a -19 priority and let you guys know if anything changed. I really don't have that many processes running when I copy to floppy, but this is a possibility

Tinkster · 08-08-2003, 11:17 PM

My educated guess would be
that linux just makes sure that
the device it thinks is there actually
still is, thus checks before it
writes ... queries on floppies are
slow, though...

Cheers,
Tink