USB Thumbdrive issue

[Martin Pitt]

Hi!

Kevin Mulligan [2004-10-19 18:07 -0400]:
> Last night I was working in Ubuntu (4.1) using OpenOffice's presentation 
> program on a MS Office Powerpoint. As I went to save it, I ran into a 
> very long (minute plus) wait as, I'm guessing, the file was written to 
> the drive. It was very much like the program had frozen, so I went to 
> another desktop panel (can't remember the correct name, sorry) and tried 
> to access the drive from there (icon was on all the desktops). It opened 
> the box, but acted like the other open connection to the drive -- a 
> white box that was not responding. After a while, they both kicked in 
> and I was able to continue.
> 
> Is this a known/discussed problem, and what can I do?

I think you could have been bitten by
https://bugzilla.ubuntulinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2386.

The problem is that USB devices are mounted "sync" by default, i. e.
all write operations are instantly done instead of buffering them
first. We do this because many users just rip out the device after
using it without proper unmounting.

The bug trail describes some alternatives how to speed up writing, i.
e. switching to async. Neither of them is comfortable, but I promise
that there will be a more comfortable way in Hoary.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                       http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer            http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer       http://www.debian.org
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