Keeping those disks synced (Score 1)

It's always struck me as suckish that UNIXes need
to be told to flush data to disks before taking
them away. I can accept having to unmount NFS shares and the like, but why my floppy drive, or even worse, READ ONLY CD DRIVE!

IMHO it'd be good if the OS still didn't block on writes, in that cp asdfsdf /mnt/floppy still came straight back to the prompt, but if there was any writes outstanding on any block device it would write until there were none - not even system areas; from observation Linux certainly seems to eagerly flush data blocks, but I suspect not the system areas of a disk. Anyway, it should indicate in some way what volumes were "safe", by turning off the floppy drive motor perhaps, so we can always eject a disk if the light's off. Just like DOS :-)