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A cross-platform filesystem that you could read/write from Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android I wonder if that is possible to implement right now... It’s simp

A cross-platform filesystem that you could read/write from Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android I wonder if that is possible to implement right now... It’s simple to adapt something like a raspberry pi to become a usb device, pluggable into another computer. It could emulate a USB drive, but depending upon the host computer’s OS, it could present the raw drive data as a different file system, fat/ntfs/ext4/whatever, and translate the host’s reads and writes back into the appropriate reads and writes of an internal ‘universal’ filesystem. You’d have to make compromises to cope with FS-specific features (like how to translate users/groups onto a more basic FAT representation of the storage, etc) but in principle it could work. ...except I’m not sure if a usb device can detect the OS of the system it is plugged into?

Nursie 7y ago
I think that's partly what MTP was supposed to be, without the os detection - a way to present the files to a host OS without needing to expose the underlying FS
therein 7y ago
> ...except I’m not sure if a usb device can detect the OS of the system it is plugged into? Great idea, and if done inside an FPGA or just using some microcontroller without involving a full OS into the stack, it would be absolutely perfect. But hey, isn't that essentially what they are doing but they are changing the "API". When it comes to fingerprinting the host OS from a USB device: https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Davis-Deriving-Intelligence-From-USB-Stack-Interactions-Slides.pdf https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Davis-Deriving-Intell...
jotm 7y ago
I'd rather not have yet another poorly cooled, poorly programmed chip that's prone to catastrophic failure (most common failure of SSDs is the controller, and USB 3.0 controllers are known to fail a lot) in the middle.
sitkack 7y ago
If you are willing to have your transport layer be IP, then the disks could expose NFS. USB has the ethernet device class, so a usb device could like an ethernet adapter. There would need to be a discovery phase when a device is inserted, probably using something like zeroconf.

Nursie 7y ago

I think that's partly what MTP was supposed to be, without the os detection - a way to present the files to a host OS without needing to expose the underlying FS

therein 7y ago

> ...except I’m not sure if a usb device can detect the OS of the system it is plugged into? Great idea, and if done inside an FPGA or just using some microcontroller without involving a full OS into the stack, it would be absolutely perfect. But hey, isn't that essentially what they are doing but they are changing the "API". When it comes to fingerprinting the host OS from a USB device: https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Davis-Deriving-Intelligence-From-USB-Stack-Interactions-Slides.pdf https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Davis-Deriving-Intell...

jotm 7y ago

I'd rather not have yet another poorly cooled, poorly programmed chip that's prone to catastrophic failure (most common failure of SSDs is the controller, and USB 3.0 controllers are known to fail a lot) in the middle.

sitkack 7y ago

If you are willing to have your transport layer be IP, then the disks could expose NFS. USB has the ethernet device class, so a usb device could like an ethernet adapter. There would need to be a discovery phase when a device is inserted, probably using something like zeroconf.