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Re: Preventing delayed USB writes



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On 05/15/07 20:37, H.S. wrote:
> pedxing wrote:
>> Lenny AMD64.
>>
>> When I write to a USB device (stick or mp3 player), I notice that
>> the writes appear to happen quickly, but actually take a long time to
>> complete.  I assume there is some form of caching going on.
>>
>> To be safe, I issue a sync command from a terminal and wait for it
>> (up to 15 minutes!) to complete before unmounting the drive.
>>
>> Is there any way to prevent the caching from occuring?  I would like
>> to configure things so that, for instance, when I (ok, actually my
>> wife) use konqueror to copy songs to my mp3 player, when the copy
>> dialog says 100%, I can immediately unmount the device without
>> having to wait for a delayed write.
> 
> I am not sure if you realize this, but you cannot do that even in
> Windows. There you actually have to click on the little USB icon on the
> system tray and choose to "remove the device safely". This is exactly

Well, you learn something new every day...

> what we do in Linux as well, well, at least in Gnome and KDE. In KDE for
> example, you right click on the USB icon and click on "safely remove".
> In both cases, it is never a good idea just to yank out the usb device,
> otherwise is likely you will get corrupted data on your USB device.

<QUESTION STYLE=RHETORICAL>
And why, pray tell, can't you just yank out the stick?
</QUESTION>

Could it be that the NT codebase, being multi-tasking, has the same
mount/unmount concept that every multi-user OS has had since 1970?

> I have found it pretty easy to make users understand this by explaining
> "just as you safely remove by clicking on the USB icon on your system
> tray in Windows, similarly, safely remove your USB devices in Gnome or
> KDE before disconnecting the device". Surprisingly, not many knew that
> they had to do this in Windows as well. Some of them learned the hard
> way ... "I copied my powerpoint to the USB stick, took out the stick,
> went to the class and tried to project the lecture to the screen but it
> won't work!"


- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!

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