FC5: Slow USB disk due to sync mode

[rainer]

Hi all,

After updating my FC4 installation to FC5, I noticed that my external 230GB USB hard disk became very slow. It also became quite noisy since the disk heads were moving all the time, even if there were only small amounts of data being written to the disk. It took me a while to find out what happens:

The USB drive is mounted automatically in asnyc mode. Looking at /etc/mtab, I can see the following entries for the 3 partitions on the disc:

/dev/sdb1 /media/lin1 ext3 rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/win1 vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,uid=500,utf8,shortname=lower 0 0
/dev/sdb3 /media/lin3 ext3 rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered 0 0

I can fix the problem by remounting the partitions manually, e.g.
mount -o remount,async /dev/sdb1
but it is quite annoying to do this every time I plug in the drive.

My Questions:
* Is this common behaviour in FC5 or due to some misconfiguration in my system?
* Shouldn't this be treated as a bug?
* What is the best workaround? (I am using KDE, if that matters)

I was searching the web for answers. The closest match to my problem was a bug report for Ubuntu from 2004:
https://bugzilla.ubuntulinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2386
Here the problem was due to a bug in pmount and eventually fixed.

Thanks, 
Rainer


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