Are we finally ditching drive letters?

rumplestiltskin · Aug 31, 2021

Fabler2 said:
How about ejecting the drive which brings up the 'safely remove' popup?

View attachment 6766

My Lenovo won't let me do that; it reports that drive as "busy" because this window is open displaying the drive (not even the contents of the drive; just the drive's icon). Usually, however, if I use the taskbar to do the ejecting, the drive icon will just vanish as expected.

cereberus · Aug 31, 2021

Here are the simple reasons why drive letters will never go from Windows.

1) virtually all software from 3rd parties would have to be re-written or rendered useless.

2) it would require a total re-write of parts of OS and I doubt it could be rolled out in parts.

and perhaps more importantly

3) By far the vast majority of users would hate this as they are familiar with letters.

The old adage applies "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

So get a grip guys and face reality.

Fabler2 · Aug 31, 2021

rumplestiltskin said:
My Lenovo won't let me do that; it reports that drive as "busy" because this window is open displaying the drive (not even the contents of the drive; just the drive's icon). Usually, however, if I use the taskbar to do the ejecting, the drive icon will just vanish as expected.

I don't use multi drive bays but just as a matter of interest is it the 4-bay enclosure limitations or Windows that's doing it?

PerpetualCycle · Aug 31, 2021

Fabler2 said:
I don't use multi drive bays but just as a matter of interest is it the 4-bay enclosure limitations or Windows that's doing it?

Windows as I said, fine for 2, not more than 2. I also had separate drive enclosures that have exhibited the same behavior.

PerpetualCycle · Aug 31, 2021

Fabler2 said:
How about ejecting the drive which brings up the 'safely remove' popup?

View attachment 6766

If only. Eject is only available for USB jump and other such drives like CF, not hard disks. And I do not know why the eject is there for them anyhow because you can just pull them out. . This has been one of the things in Windows that has been a major annoyance to me for a while. In my experience, designing or accepting something with a least common denominator in mind has pretty much never resulted in something of good quality. I would hope Microsoft would strive for excellence. Anyhow </rant>. I am sure I already pissed enough people off and that was not my intent.

jimbo45 · Aug 31, 2021

Hi there

26 effectively in the English alphabet yields in theory probably about 25 choices for volumes, less the mandatory one for the Windows OS -- not really a problem. What Windows though really needs is a sensible internal RAID system. With GPT there's no limit on the number of physical partitions either (up to 25 in practice because of the volume naming restriction) if you use these as discrete volumes.

Storage spaces are - or at least in my experience unreliable is a feature where you can compound disks especially data drives.

These days many people have a load of Multi-media files which can take up several TB of storage. Spreading these over into individual drives makes handling and manipulation of these much more of a chore than having even a JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks" defined and handled as a single drive. The Storage spaces feature is designed to do that sort of thing but it just doesn't seem to work reliably on Consumer versions of Windows (on servers it seems to work).

The problem also with the file systems employed by storage spaces is that a lot of NAS and Android devices can't read / write to them either so for file serving / multi-media streaming, Backups etc to other devices you are stuck or limited to Windows only devices - and I don't know of any Smart TV's running any version of Windows !!!!

A simple Windows solution (it's basically there already in the WSL) would be for Windows to be able to handle Linux formatted drives directly when physically attached to the system including Linux software RAID. The main file systems EXT4, XFS, and BTRFS would be sufficient. Then these drives would be mounted or accessed simply as //diskname, Simple --job done !!!

Cheers
jimbo

Try3 · Aug 31, 2021

geneo said:
... right clicking on the drive and being able to choose safely remove from the context menu ...

You mean in the way Windows 10 already does when you right-click on any removeable drive & choose Eject?
Are you saying that this function does not exist in Win11?

Denis

jimbo45 · Aug 31, 2021

Try3 said:
You mean in the way Windows 10 already does when you right-click on any removeable drive & choose Eject?
Are you saying that this function does not exist in Win11?

Denis

Eject works on my W11 system -- not sure what the problem is with eject. !!
Cheers
jimbo

jbcarreon123 · Aug 31, 2021

geneo said:
If only. Eject is only available for USB jump and other such drives like CF, not hard disks. And I do not know why the eject is there for them anyhow because you can just pull them out. . This has been one of the things in Windows that has been a major annoyance to me for a while. In my experience, designing or accepting something with a least common denominator in mind has pretty much never resulted in something of good quality. I would hope Microsoft would strive for excellence. Anyhow </rant>. I am sure I already pissed enough people off and that was not my intent.

First of all, ejecting an hard disk can result in an BSOD (even data loss) even if the drive is non-system disk.
Second, pulling a disk that's caching-enabled will result to an data loss.

Bree · Aug 31, 2021

geneo said:
Seriously? I want to only Dismount my Data Drive R: Which one of those is that?

View attachment 6763

That's odd, mine shows all the volume labels and drive letters.

BunnyJ · Aug 31, 2021

geneo said:
Well I need to do that. No disrespect meant but just because you don't need to doesn't mean other people don't. And yeah, they should get rid of it and replace it with a proper dismount in the drive's context.

I never said all.,. but I suspect the majority will not want or like this kind of change. And as it was pointed out the change would require a massive effort by software makers to adjust to the new format by rewriting all of their code. Not a simple job.

I would just like to know how I would benefit from a change like this

Wynona · Aug 31, 2021

BunnyJ said:
I never said all.,. but I suspect the majority will not want or like this kind of change. And as it was pointed out the change would require a massive effort by software makers to adjust to the new format by rewriting all of their code. Not a simple job.

I would just like to know how I would benefit from a change like this

Same here, Jeff. I don't see any benefit to any of this.

PerpetualCycle · Aug 31, 2021

Well anyhow, end rant.

jimbo45 said:
Eject works on my W11 system -- not sure what the problem is with eject. !!
Cheers
jimbo

Ejecting what. a hard drive? For external hard drive mounted with a policy of Better Performance instead of Quick Removal , at least on my system, eject does not even show up in the drive context menu. As I have already stated if you read my posts.

PerpetualCycle · Aug 31, 2021

Bree said:
That's odd, mine shows all the volume labels and drive letters.

View attachment 6769

It's funny sometimes mine does too. If I spin up the drives I don't see the line with the drive letter. But if they idle and spin down, then I click on the safely eject and they spin back up, then I see the identifying lines.

PerpetualCycle · Aug 31, 2021

jbcarreon123 said:
First of all, ejecting an hard disk can result in an BSOD (even data loss) even if the drive is non-system disk.
Second, pulling a disk that's caching-enabled will result to an data loss.

??? I said that eject only shows up for drives with a policy of Quick removal. And in t his case you can pull them out if they are idle without data loss because write caching is disabled. That is the whole idea, though it is best to eject them. Eject does not show up for drives with a policy of "better performance" - you have to use the taskbar safely remove for them. I was not suggesting you should be able to eject these drives but that the "safely remove" be in the drive right context menu.

jimbo45 · Sep 1, 2021

geneo said:
??? I said that eject only shows up for drives with a policy of Quick removal. And in t his case you can pull them out if they are idle without data loss because write caching is disabled. That is the whole idea, though it is best to eject them. Eject does not show up for drives with a policy of "better performance" - you have to use the taskbar safely remove for them. I was not suggesting you should be able to eject these drives but that the "safely remove" be in the drive right context menu.

SSD's can be removed quickly without loss of data no moving parts etc etc -- but if you have external USB connected large TB volume classical spinners these take a finite time before they are quiesced so IMO they should always be disconnected via eject.

Cheers
jimbo