Patrick Haller wrote in a message to Keith Thomson:

 PH> Of course you're right. But HPOFS was really designed for
 PH> opticals - and a Syquest (or Zip-drive, etc.) work rather
 PH> like harddisks, in particular this concerns their disk
 PH> organisation formats. So HPFS provides by far the best
 PH> performance on those medias. HOPFS can't reach up to HPFS by
 PH> design. 

Optical media of the kind that HPOFS uses is organized in
cylinder-head-sector arrangement on the physical media, and most such
drives are accessed via SCSI using RBA counts.  Aside from the device type
code returned in response to a SCSI Inquiry, these drives look just like
hard drives even from the SCSI point of view, with the exception that you
can access only one side of the platter at a time.

 PH> For future OS/2 releases I just wish Unix-style mounting, so
 PH> HPFS can be used on those removeable medias with the fully
 PH> blown caching. The I/O subsystem and IFS-interface need/have
 PH> to supply control mechanisms on unlocking/locking the
 PH> physical device, flushing _all_ IFS-caches,
 PH> mounting/unmounting of IFS during runtime and ejecting the
 PH> media.
 PH> After all my efforts I'm convinced it's up to IBM to provide
 PH> this functionality - I can't apply it to the system :)

You could write your own IFS to do this.  There is no reason in principle
why it could not be done, and I would be happy to do it for you if you
wrote a sufficiently large check.

 PH> To be honest, there is one last chance for a little more
 PH> comfort for changing the HPFS-formatted medias: according to
 PH> Mike Bilow several enhancements in LOCKDRV.FLT would provide
 PH> sufficent lock/unlock functionality along with
 PH> DSK_REDTERMINEMEDIA.

You would need a sideways control utility to send IOCtl directives down to
the FLT, which is quite easy to do.  It would look like the Unix
"mount" command.
 
-- Mike


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