[arch-general] Finally found a solution to slow USB on HAL

[Ross]

On 29/06/10 08:52, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> Excerpts from Denis A. Altoé Falqueto's message of 2010-06-28 18:33:30 +0200:
>> On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Pálffy András Gergely
>> <pagesailor at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Works here too. Great, thanks.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Nilesh Govindarajan<lists at itech7.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>>   I have made a patch for /usr/share/hal/fdi/20-storage-methods.fdi to force
>>>> async file transfer for vfat filesystems by commenting out flush and sync as
>>>> valid options from the list.
>>>> I checked the thing, now I'm getting the old high speed USB transfer.
>>>> Do take a look at it, and comment.
>>
>> Yes, but you should keep in mind that you'll spend extra time when you
>> want to unmount your USB stick. So I prefer a "slow" transfer and a
>> fast unmount, because usually I'm in hurry for taking off the USB
>> drive and the unmounting visualizations are not very smart (only in
>> KDE SC 4.4 it is really usable).
>
> Actually I was recently wondering a bit about the unmounting part,
> especially with USB sticks. I do have udev rules, taken from the wiki,
> in place that handle automatic mounting. There's also a unmounting part,
> which afair removes created dirs, but I guess this is only called after
> the usb drive is removed. It did happen more than once to me that a file
> transfer seemed to be complete, but when I just removed the drive, the
> data was gone. Is there a way to provide automatic safe removal? Manual
> unmounting is a bit of a PITA, as you need to have a terminal ready,
> guess sdN and type a line, where the device guessing part is the most
> problematic. I tend to use /dev/sdN to make sure that I remove the
> device from all mount points. Thanks for any advice.

I am no expert and am probably missing something here, but it should be 
simple to create a desktop icon and/or menu option to issue the sync 
command. That way you could have the speed of asynchronous mount and 
clicking the icon or menu option before removing the drive will write 
any buffered data to the device to prevent data loss if removing the 
device without umounting. As the sync command syncs all mounted drives 
you don't need to provide the /dev/sdN.

Ross.