Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
No. The point is that it is being done WRONG in the phone. In the example given I can access the SD card and modify files from both the pc where it is mounted and other pcs at the same time. ( I don't care how it is done or for explanations of why it doesn't work) Not the case when I connect the phone to my computer....suddenly the phone can't see the sd card! 
If the windows situation were the same then the networked PCs couldn't see the windows "mounted" sd card. It's simply wrong. |
(emphasis mine)
You are comparing apples and oranges: you can't expect a physical direct serial connection, like the USB cable, to behave like a network.
The difference between YOUR example of windows situation and what I wrote, is that you wrote about "Networked PCs", while you have never networked the Android phone and your PC. You connect them via USB cable, which is NOT networking at all. If you have a network, ONE device has control over the "SD drive", and all others communicate to the device through some sort of message-exchanging network; when you plug the USB cable from your android phone to your PC, unfortunately, there's no network involved: you have 2 computers (I include any smartphone under the name "computer"), both of which want direct, physical access to the SD card. You have to choose.
If you want to reproduce the same situation using 2 windows PC, try to buy an external SD card reader, and connect it to both PCs at the same time (assuming that you can), and try to use the SD card from both. You can't, simply: one of the two will tell you that the device is held by another hardware.
You want to access files from the SD card from both the Android phone and your PC? Network is the way to go, as in your windows example. And the FTP solution I wrote about is just that: a networking implementation that is compatible with both windows and Linux, and so it works.
Under the sheets, what happens (in both FTP and windows networks) is that ONE computing device has control of the memory device, and the other PCs "ask" the first to perform operations on his SD card.