Is it a correct assumption to say that a system drive does not appear/disappear at runtime?

Maybe. This means that removable USB hard drives, for instance, will be considered safe to write to, but the UX pattern definitely makes sense to me.

I guess it also depends what we decide "system drive" to mean? AFAIK there's not really yet any good definition of what that means, and I wonder if there should be? (I think at the moment it's any drive which drivelist identifies as non-removable?)

Yeah, as mentioned in balena-io-modules/drivelist#126, the proposal is to rename "system" to mean "non-removable" and add a new "system" property that is only true when that drive contains an operating system installed (e.g: the hard drive containing / in Linux, or usually C: in Windows).

After making such changes, the feature discussed here starts making more sense, since we'll whitelist non-removable drives that are non-system drives if they are inserted after Etcher is already running.

Will Etcher still auto-select a drive with the multi-write functionality? Does it make sense to auto-select a drive that appeared after Etcher started? Currently, the auto-select feature is great but wouldn't be that straightforward in the next version.

I think the auto-selection does still make sense (even with multi-write). It would only auto-select if there was a single removable drive detected (even if that removable drive is inserted after Etcher has started). Anything else will require manual user interaction.

However, this does imply that even after auto-selection, we would have a CTA button to open the drive menu, right?

Currently we use 'change' for that. There will be a similar interaction.

Still seeing this issue on the last version (1.1.2)
I'd love to see this fixed.
I'm trying to copy an image directly to a mSATA drive. For that I'm using a mSATA to USB adapter which is sadly not detected as a removable drive.
It seems indeed logical that a drive added at runtime should be assumed as being removable !!
In the mean time : Back to CLI

@estevesd Or you could simply enable the "unsafe mode" in Etcher's settings, which will then allow you to write to "system" drives 😀

At some point, it would be good to remove this option from settings and move it directly under the drives list as proposed.

@konmouz Yeah, I still think #888 is worth doing, it just isn't top of our priority lists at the moment.

@lurch, makes sense.