8

when the user plugs in a flash drive fr the 1st time mske a message baloon appear

in this message baloon instruct the user to click eject before unplugging the drive. provide option to not show the baloon again

my own experience - i let a friend to use the computer and she did not figure out that it must be properly unmounted (she is used to windows xp where it is ok to just unplug). result - the files she copied to it were not really copied

conclusion - the users may fail to associate the eject button with unplugging the device or may be used to ignore this feature from windows

I had this problem the first time too. (Some years ago thou).

(What really annonys me is that distromakers can't configure
whatever there is to configure so that caching isn't used with
flash devices. Udev config?)

It's NOT okay to unplug flash drives from XP computers. The data is being cached the same as Linux. Microsoft calls it "Safely Remove Hardware" Many folks ignore it of course, even some of us Linux users.

fbt wrote:It's NOT okay to unplug flash drives from XP computers. The data is being cached the same as Linux. Microsoft calls it "Safely Remove Hardware" Many folks ignore it of course, even some of us Linux users.

I do not agree with you. Windows 2000 did cache exacly the same way as most (all?) distros does now. Windows XP did not. However, pulling the flashdrive when in the middle of a file will of course screw that file even if caching is set to off.

How XP detected which drive is a external drive, I do not know, probably looking at which interface the drive is connected through.

According this site, http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html it looks like we are both right Seems to depend if you format with NTFS or FAT, and if it's a "local drive" or "removable media." I suspect this became an issue when external hard drives started using USB

As far as i remember in XP was an option to either use cache (performance mode) or write directly to drive (safe mode) or something.

I would really like to have an option to have predominance AND safe modes in Linux.
I understand that chaching is good when you work with many files/ rarely unplug usb, but t is very time wasting annoying to unmount manually when I have to copy only 1-3 files, or copy same file to many flash drives (e.g. share some pdf with my mates).

can kde (running with user permissions) request the linux os to not cache a drive ?

or can some1 notify the linux distros devs of the issue ? (and ask them to configure the drives to not cache etc)