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

[Nilesh Govindarajan]

On 06/29/2010 05:44 AM, Ross wrote:
> 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.

Yeah exactly !
After copy your data to the drive, run the sync command or setup a 
keyboard shortcut for it :-)
This will give you high speed transfer along with no data loss \m/

But if you're very forgetful to remove the drive without pressing the 
keyboard shortcut for sync, then you're in trouble and this patch is not 
for you.

Alternatively, you could write a bash daemon as per this tutorial: 
http://j.mp/9DRWOF

which will check for a usb stick's existence and if its mounted, sync 
every 15-30 seconds.

-- 
Regards,
Nilesh Govindarajan
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