Unnecessary seeks on mounted floppies?

Martin Buck (martin-2.buck@student.uni-ulm.de)
Sun, 14 Apr 1996 00:16:33 +0200 (MET DST)

Is there anyone out there who can explain to me why Linux frequently seeks
to track 0 when reading from mounted floppies?

These seeks happen about every 6-9 seconds when reading a file that was
written unfragmented (in that case, the floppy-head shouldn't move more
than one track at once). The time between the seeks seems to vary depending
on the filesystem on the disk.

Originially, I thought these head-movements would be caused by updating the
file's access-time, but they also happen on read-only mounted msdos-disks,
so this can't be the reason.

Anyone got a better explanation (and possibly a fix)?

Martin

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