On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 10:55:18PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote: > On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 09:01:57PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > > On 05/15/07 20:37, H.S. wrote: > > > pedxing wrote: > > >> Lenny AMD64. > > >> > > >> When I write to a USB device (stick or mp3 player), I notice that > > >> the writes appear to happen quickly, but actually take a long time to > > >> complete. I assume there is some form of caching going on. > > >> > > >> To be safe, I issue a sync command from a terminal and wait for it > > >> (up to 15 minutes!) to complete before unmounting the drive. > > >> > > >> Is there any way to prevent the caching from occuring? I would like > > >> to configure things so that, for instance, when I (ok, actually my > > >> wife) use konqueror to copy songs to my mp3 player, when the copy > > >> dialog says 100%, I can immediately unmount the device without > > >> having to wait for a delayed write. > > > > > > I am not sure if you realize this, but you cannot do that even in > > > Windows. There you actually have to click on the little USB icon on the > > > system tray and choose to "remove the device safely". This is exactly > > > > Well, you learn something new every day... > > > > > what we do in Linux as well, well, at least in Gnome and KDE. In KDE for > > > example, you right click on the USB icon and click on "safely remove". > > > In both cases, it is never a good idea just to yank out the usb device, > > > otherwise is likely you will get corrupted data on your USB device. > > > > <QUESTION STYLE=RHETORICAL> > > And why, pray tell, can't you just yank out the stick? > > </QUESTION> > > The memory chips in a memory stick are special, not the same as RAM > chips. They don't need continual refresh to keep the data valid, AND > they do write data in relatively large blocks and have a relatively > short service life if blocks are frequently rewritten. Their best life > is had if the OS caches the data in RAM and only writes to the stick > infrequently, like maybe just once at the point where you are about to > dismount it. You should _not_ use ext2/3 on these, unless you figure > out how to disable the constant updating of the last access time on > the fs.
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