this would be interesting behavior to really dig-in and investigate (in all of my spare time, of course). NT is a lot like linux (no, really), external hard dr

this would be interesting behavior to really dig-in and investigate (in all of my spare time, of course). NT is a lot like linux (no, really), external hard drives and flash drives are represented as SCSI drives exactly like local SATA disks (think /dev/sda for your root and /dev/sdd for your thumb drive). the big difference is in the cache manager. windows recognizes that "surprise removals" of thumb drives is a lot more likely than "surprise removals" of fixed disks and it adjusts the aggressiveness of the cache manager accordingly (this is controlled via "device properties->policies" from the device manager). in the client case (copying something onto your flash drive from a CIFS server) there shouldn't be any difference to the FS/IO stack than copying it from your desktop via explorer. the server case is a little different, srv.sys does writes a little differently than usermode clients, but...