Writing out track info to disk could be very useful, and at the same time, it opens the "read/write disk" can of worms.


Maybe it's me, but sometimes I think that we all get a bit carried away about this. Yes, the empeg guys did a fantastic job of protecting our drives in their daily use - both in HW (choosing laptop drives, shock mounting) and in SW (keeping the disks spun down as much as possible, only mounting read-only), and I am both impressed with and grateful for their design ingenuity.

But the fact remains - these are laptop drives, and they are shock mounted. Millions of people use laptops with RW disks spinning in cars, on aeroplanes etc, carrying them around and plonking them down on hard desks without regard to whether they are going to crash their heads. I suppose one might argue that when being used on a lap in a car, that the person provides some shock mounting for the laptop as a whole, but that isn't the only modus operandi.

I'm not saying that we should mount all the paritions RW, and leave the disks spinning all the time. But I do wonder whether our collective paranoia is un-necessary. I'm tempted to interface an accelerometer to my empeg, and attach it to the drive caddy. The only problem is that I'd need the disks RW to log the results

I don't think that we should write data constantly either - but we could cache data to be written, thus minimizing risks as far as possible.