Hi Patrick, I think he did RTFM. From page 292 of the 9.2 SuSE Administration Guide: "SUSE Linux supports the automatic detection of moble storage devices over fireware or USB... The user is completely spared the manual mounting and unmounting that was found in previous versions of SUSE LINUX. Device can simply be dosconnected as soon as no program accesses it." These devices use SUBFS and SUBMOUNT, of which I know very little. Maybe they don't buffer writes to IEEE 1394 and USB storage? Left as an exercise for the student is determining when "no program accesses it", which gets back to the backwards light again... Regards, Lew Wolfgang Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* Greg Freemyer
[02-24-05 17:26]: Do you guys know what your talking about? I hope not!!!
of course.
I thought the usb flash drives were mounted SYNC, meaning that there are not any kernel buffers maintained.
If a drive is *mounted* is is *unsafe* to remove.
An unmounted (umount) is not available for writing/reading and *is* safe to remove.
Time for you to return to the Administrative Guide and the User Guide provided with your distribution.
Therefore if all the files are closed it is safe to pull it out. (Much better than Windows where you have to tell Windows to disable the thumb drive.)
I don't tend to work directly on my flash drives, just copy things on and off.
I normally do things from the command-line, so as soon as any copy commands finish, I just yank it out.
I wish you well, but think not.
If I was concerned that something might be using the USB drive in the background, I would use the 'fuser -m /media/usb-*' command.
This will indicate that it is unsafe to remove but *not* that it is safe to remove.