[Sussex] USB Flash Drive

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On 9:10:19 pm 11/10/2005 John Thompson <jdthompson at themutual.net> wrote:
> When I want to disconnect a USB flash drive or a digital camera, is
> it alright just to unplug it - or should I do somthing first?

See what everyone else said about unmounting, but with one big exception.

Check the output of "mount" to see if your usb disk is mounted with the
"sync" option. If it is (and small ones quite often are) then you can rip
it out at will. Sync mode means that changes to the disk are written
immediately. This will appear to make copying slower, but in fact it isn't
and instead it means that as soon as nautilus/cp/whatever tells you the
copy is done, it is done and you can remove the device.
The reason you have to tell the computer you want to remove it (ie click
something, or unmount or whatever the OS requires you to do) is because the
OS is caching data before it's written, to give you the impression it
happened quicker. If you rip the disk out at that point, the updated
filesystem data is still in RAM and will be lost.

Cheers,
---
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
  www.tenshu.net