Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!gurgle
From: gurgle@well.sf.ca.us (Pete Gontier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Determining if a drive is a hard drive
Message-ID: <21073@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 8 Oct 90 05:19:01 GMT
References: <1990Oct4.205555.3700@eng.umd.edu> <21041@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Oct6.194429.24105@eng.umd.edu>
Organization: cellular
Lines: 45

In article <1990Oct6.194429.24105@eng.umd.edu> russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) writes:
>In article <21041@well.sf.ca.us> gurgle@well.sf.ca.us (Pete Gontier) writes:
>>Well, the problem with this method is that as soon as you have Syquest
>>volumes lying around, your test fails, because they're ejectable.
>
>OK.  Define 'hard drive'.  Is a floppy a hard drive (guess not).  A Bernoulli
>(welll....?)  How about a Syquest?  Or a Quantum Q250 (Obviously)

That's another problem. Another hard call to make. Another reason for Apple
to cut us some slack on the almighty device-independence paradigm. Some of us
really _do_ need to determine what media is out there.

>What exactly is it you need to know?

Well, I'll give the specific example in my experience. We decided one day
that we needed to re-evaluate which kinds of volumes we were going to
support with KiwiFINDER. Network volumes were right out because the design
spec didn't include AFP interface. Floppy volumes were out because it was
too likely a user would circulate a floppy around, have someone change it,
and then be confused when the catalog was no longer up-to-date. Then someone
mentioned Syquest drives. You can carry those around from machine to machine,
but they're 40M and it's likely people would like to be able to build
catalogs on them. And then you have the 20M floppies to confuse the issue
even further. And updating a catalog on a WORM drive... ick. Etc. etc.

What happens is you have developers trying to make informed decisions to
avoid confusing the user unnecesarily, and the developers don't even have
legitimate tools with which to gather the information they need. Bunch
of blind men fumbling about in the dark.

>>>(you won't get any remote volumes, but you can't find out what they are
>>>anyway)
>>
>>Sure you can; do it by running the VCB queue and querying driver names
>>as I explained.
>
>But all you can find out is that it IS a remote volume, not whether it is
>a floppy, hard drive, write only memory, etc...

Ah, quite correct. I never imagined anyone would care about the medium once
a given volume was determined to be some kind of remote network volume.
Somebody might want to in order to make performance estimates, I suppose.
-- 
 Pete Gontier, gurgle@well.sf.ca.us
 Software Imagineer, Kiwi Software, Inc.