That is trivial. *You* are creating the files. *You* are supplying the VTOC to the browser/OS. The filenames need not be meaningful to the user -- they just have to be unique and easily mapped to recognizable accesses. E.g., files could be named "1", "2", "3",... and each be one block long *and* (coincidentally?) arranged on the medium such that file N is at block N thereby making the mapping process easily invertible.
Remember, you aren't trying to be a generic, repurposable storage device. Rather, just trying to act like an "address decoder". Similar to hanging a '138 on some address lines and using the decoded *strobe* outputs to "do things" regardless of the "data" on the bus at the time...
You're fetching a web page. Does the browser ignore "Expires" because it considers "file://" URL's to be "different" than other URL's? I didn't notice anything allowing that behavior in the spec...
Note that there are browser *bugs* that you have to work around but, IME, those fixes are trivial -- especially if you have no concern over the size/content of the "actual files" (since they aren't *really* files but, rather, just "file accesses").
IIRC, "Expires" was explicitly designed to tell *everything* between the "source" and "browser" NOT to cache the data. I.e., the onus is on the browser to tell the OS to "go back to the source" for each new reference to the URL.
I have no idea how anti-virus software works (my products are immune to virii and I don't use it "personally"). Are you claiming that
*any* reference by *any* piece of software to *any* storage medium leaves the door open for a virus scanner to poke around *everything* on that medium?This should be easy to test. Put a few tens of thousands of 10KB files on a USB stick in a folder. Access *one* file in that folder. See how long the device stays "busy".
Better yet, do something similar with a floppy (smaller files) and see if the drive stays busy for "a second" or "minutes". Hmmm... I wonder if I have any tools that will log these accesses? I think there may be one of the SysInternals suite that can watch a medium and log all accesses to it. If so, I should be able to put N bogus pages on a thumb drive and watch to see what the browser *actually* does!