I'm finding under Cygwin, with 

ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i386-cygwin]

that if I Dir.glob(path) for a path under /cygdrive/c, the floppy
drive is accessed.  I'm trying to avoid a Huge recursive glob that
for a user appears to just hang, so I trying to descend directories
recursively, but this is slowed down a lot, because for every glob
the floppy drive becomes active for about half a second, and it's
noisy [!].

There have been problems with 1.7 Cygwin always accessing the floppy,
but this is 1.5.25, so that should not matter.

Has anyone else seen this, and is there a workaround?  I need tools
that I have under Cygwin only, so not using Cygwin here will involve
a lot more work to find other tools to do those parts that presently
work.

also, is anything else faster than Dir.glob?  I'll have a look at
File.find later, in case that is, but it would be nice to know....

        Thank you,
        Hugh