Please Microsoft - Can we get away from Drive Letters

Hi all

Might not be a problem for a lot but I'm beginning to run out of letters for Networking disk drives on Windows systems. Once you start sharing multiple CD / DVD devices and multiple external devices (USB sticks, Ipods etc etc) and have may be 12 - 14 Virtual machines together with a decent TEST Bench set of real machines all up and running in a computer test lab this becomes a real pain.

Isn't it about time to get rid of the C:\ type nomenclenture (originated way back in the 8 bit Intel 8086 MS DOS days or even before).

Even the UNC system is pretty OK (\\name\mount) .

I'm not sure what type of change would be needed to the file system but IMO the change is LONG LONG overdue. Why on earth we are still stuck with this system which has been around "Since Pontius was a Pilot" I can't imagine.

It really wouldn't be a major problem to be compatable with earlier systems -- you could easily have a simple internal map say references to C:\ would be replaced by \\Mountpoint whenever the I/O was requested. Overhead would be very small.

(In any case it's really time to change the NTFS system -- but that's another topic entirely which would be a bit more complex).

Cheers

jimbo

I do like the way linux refers to hard disks, its very logical.

You can sort of get rid of drive letters in windows explorer by unticking show drive letters in options.

I can see your point given the amount of stuff you have going, but have to agree with Ex-Brit. The Alpha system still seems to be the simple way to go. Been using it since the advent of d. . 1.0.

Over the years, I have used that technique to eliminate drive letters. It has one disadvantage, however. When you look to see how much free space there is, the drives that are mounted in folders are not reported. That may have changed since I haven't used it in Vista or Windows 7.

Bye.

baarod said:

Oh my Lord in heaven! It's been there for years and NOBODY USES IT!

umm... aa: bb: cc: xx: yy: zz: ?

Hi all
Even if you do this there's a limit to the number of Partitions (Disks) you can connect.

After 13 it just refuses to show any more disks -- since when you ADD one it will try and assign a letter anyway even changing the explorer option.

("13" in this case because 12 other devices are already allocated - Card reader - 7 devices - MULTI card reader considers each slot as a device, Floppy drive (although not used for years), 4 DVD devices.

maybe now is the time to consider "Stand alone" Network drives -- it works for printers and some "Multi-media" drives - this would also make the motherboards much simpler and sharing would also be easier as you wouldn't have to have the Host computer running.

Network throoughput would need to be improved however.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi all
Even if you do this there's a limit to the number of Partitions (Disks) you can connect.

After 13 it just refuses to show any more disks -- since when you ADD one it will try and assign a letter anyway even changing the explorer option.

("13" in this case because 12 other devices are already allocated - Card reader - 7 devices - MULTI card reader considers each slot as a device, Floppy drive (although not used for years), 4 DVD devices.

maybe now is the time to consider "Stand alone" Network drives -- it works for printers and some "Multi-media" drives - this would also make the motherboards much simpler and sharing would also be easier as you wouldn't have to have the Host computer running.

Network throoughput would need to be improved however.

Cheers
jimbo

Are you talking about running out of IRQ's? and also locally or networked "13"? I used to have this rig hosting everything on the network jim, have had well over "13" connected if you count optical drives, floppy, card reader etc.

I have now setup the network like you have mentioned, stand-alone network drives, on a network usb hub... just on that hub i can have up to 16 devices plugged into that, which like i said, was plugged into this rig. Only 1 device, printer/scanner/copier, was not a drive.

As far as thoroughput or feasability.... its pretty good. I did just for the simple task of softening the load on the primary host rig. The only down side to doing the network this way is that only 1 user at a time can have access to a particular drive. Another user can then "request" the use of the drive. So if i am listening to my music drive, no one else on the network can listen to or use the music drive while i'm listening/using it.