When I plug in and mount a USB drive and copy files from my laptop hard drive to the USB hard drive, the progress goes extremely fast and then a notification is displaying that "Copying [Finished]" and the files are visible in the USB drive directory. However, this is not true. As soon as I unmount the USB drive, the actual copying begins. There is no indication of this copying progress unless I am using a USB drive with a flashing light (once the flashing stops and the USB drive is no longer showing up as mounted, then I can remove it).

Is there any way to configure KDE so that copying actually begins after dropping files onto the USB drive and progress is indicated for that?

This is a behaviour of the Linux kernel itself, rather than KDE. The default mount arguments are not determined by KDE, but rather the service KDE asks to mount the disk for it - usually UDisks on newer systems, or HAL on older ones.

If you add an entry to /etc/fstab then UDisks may follow that - i'm not sure though. I believe this behaviour is controllable with a mount option however.

I don't know if this is a mounting issue. I've got both KDE and Gnome installed with Fedora 16. If I switch to Gnome, there is a progress indicator while copying files to the USB flash drive. And, it only seems to be an issue with USB flash drives. I just finished copying over 20 GB to an external USB-powered hard drive in KDE and there was correct progress during the operation. Do you think the kernel is mounting USB flash drives differently in KDE only?

KDE will be providing different arguments to UDisks compared to GNOME. You may with to send a email to the kde-hardware-devel@kde.org mailing list, or file a bug against "solid" on bugs.kde.org regarding this.