weird removable media behavior

[Anne Wilson]

On Friday 20 April 2007, Robin Laing wrote:
> Michael Klinosky wrote:
> > Mikkel:
> >> A couple of questions - are you unmounting the drive before
> >> unplugging it?
> >
> > No. I considered doing that, but then thought, 'USB is hot-pluggable, so
> > that should be auto-magic.'
> >
> > But, seems like it's not (hence the vestige device).
>
> The problem with just removing a USB device is "time" to clear the
> cache.  I have ran into an issue with FC4 and it removing the icon for
> the device before all the writes were complete.  I trashed the file
> system.  I reported it and there was a fix that showed a pop-up when the
> device was safe to be removed.
>
> If your USB device has a light on it, try this test.  Copy a large file
> to the device and watch the light to see how long before it starts the
> write and how long it takes for the write to complete.
>
> Even Windows requires you to umnount USB drives so the cache can also be
> cleared.
>
If you use gkrellm you may find it useful to add sda or whatever it sees to 
its display.  I do that for my removable hard drive, which allows me to see 
when all activity has stopped.  A couple of seconds of silence on the display 
means it has definitely flushed the cache :-)

Anne