Detecting a card?


Tor

Active Member
Joined
Oct 3, 2008
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After looking at the picture here: http://openpandora.org/pandora-boardv2.jpg a thought occured to me and I didn't see anything about it after a (possibly too) quick search.

Does the Pandora have a way of detecting that a card is about to get removed, so that the operating system can unmount it in time? The Nokia tablets have sensors (magnetic and otherwise) which signals the operating system so that it can mount the card automatically, and more importantly, unmount it before the user actually rips the card out. Otherwise there's a big risk of card corruption.

So the question is: How is this done on the Pandora?
 
Right click > Unmount. :p

If linux is typically configured like it is on my pc then it unmounting isn't a split second thing and can often take a few minuites to happen. I assume this is because it's caching things to memory, so a program would appear to have finished copying, but it's actually still going in the background.

Hopefully the devs will disable the caching and background writing. It's a really annoying feature for removable media. I doubt the SD slots would have any sensors though. Would put the price up, and probably patented anyway.
 
You really don't want any kind of synchronous write to the SD card, trust me on this. So, if there's no sensor, we will have to do it the 'usb stick' way (that is, manually and carefully), which is a bit unfortunate - I bet there will be many reports of corrupted cards. The large-capacity SDHC cards seem to have longer settling times (presumably due to actual internal RAM caches) than old, small capacity cards.

No doubt there are many silly patents around, but I kind of doubt there's a patent on a simple sensor that just detects if a door or whatever is closed or open: they can be used for just about anything.
 
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