[ILUG] USB drive mounted async

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Gareth Eason wrote:

> Bernhard Rohrer wrote:
> [snip]
> > I simply want to be able to plug and unplug without having to think
> > further. sorry for trying to achieve windows-like behaviour ;) As for
> > wear and tear on the flash, why?
> 
> Just as in Windows - to eject a USB device safely you must tell the OS
> that you are about to remove it. In Ubuntu, you right click the mounted
> device on your desktop (or in a Nautilus window) and select Eject. This
> performs a sync and umount, allowing you to safely remove the device.

One notable exception to this is edubuntu's current ltspfs setup.  On an
edubuntu edgy thin client (and I think ltsp5 in general), you can pop in a
USB mass storage device into a thin client.  The hotplugging stuff on the
thin client mounts the device, signals to the server that it's available
and after a second or two gnome running on the server pops an icon on the
desktop.  Really lovely.

The only thing about it is that it does things with the equivalent of the
sync option.  I suspect there are good reasons for this, but they have
decided to leave out the eject/unmount option entirely.  So, users are
expected to wait until all file transfers are done and just pull the device
out.

I must admit, I think this is a slightly dangerous design.  Some people
used to desktops will be confused, wondering "where is the eject button?"
and others will learn on thin clients and then move to a regular pc and
just pull their usb key out when file transfers appear to be complete.
This usuability issue is bad, not to mention the issue of the life of the
storage device.

Gavin