On 9/1/2000 Fish Smith wrote:
I was taught in kindergarten /never/ to remove a disk when the light was on, and I never do it. Removing while it is mounted but not currently being read or written isn't very damaging--you just get an error message, have to unmount and remount.
this is true if you are using DOS, but not true of unix, unlike DOS unix will not write data back to the disk (or at least metadata, im not sure of the details) immediately, it caches the data to keep disk IO efficient, so removing a disk without unmounting it is just as dangerous as pulling the power cord out of the wall socket without shutting down the machine properly. you will very likely end up with a corrupted filesystem on your floppy. (I have tested this in fact with an ext2 floppy and did indeed get a corrupted filesystem, and no i did not eject it when the light was on)
I really don't have an opinion either way on the auto vs manual eject buttons, I just wanted to point out that ejecting a mounted (read-write) filesystem without unmounting even when the disk activity light is off is NOT a safe or harmless thing to do.
-- Ethan Benson To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/