How do you use USB ?

[minthaka]

I'm using Linux since more than a year, so I don't consider myself as a newbie. Still, I have a persistant problem with all the distros I've used: the USB or pendrives.
1. At the transfer of files I can never be sure that the files were sent to my USB stick. I can always see their icons in the /media/usbdisk folder, but it happened to me countless times that I was blamed as I've tried to open these certain documents on other PC ( no matter wich OS ). That was always a blame to Linux!
2. With Ubuntu I have a right-click option "Safely Remove" my USB. It works sometimes, but very often not. I would give 55% stability to USB device handling skills of the distros I met.
3. The transfer of files is very slow ( both USB 1.0 and 2.0). There are no differences neither with CPU. Is it possible to increase the priorities of USB - PC transactions ?

I'm writing this thinking somebody else is satisfied with this group of questions.
The USB handling is a basic need today. I'm using it every day. Thanks for help!

[netstrider]

To be honest, it has happened to me too that I've copied files and not actually had them on the USB drive when I needed them, also, regardless of the OS. I think the best way is to see which drive is your USB drive by running the command fdisk -l (as root). Then in the future you can be sure your files will be written if you unmount it manually with umount /dev/sdc1 for example (all depends which device is your USB drive).

As for slow transfer speeds and optimizing them, I don't know and can unfortunately not help you.

Good luck

[bigtomrodney]

I have had these problems in the past, but not in the last 18+ months. Gnome desktop warns you that a device is synchronising if data is still pending. All I need to unmount is to ensure that any applications using it are closed and hit unmount. No problem. Obviously a drive will not unmount without problems if you have it open in a terminal or a media player is reading/checking it.

[minthaka]

My disciple told me today that the problem with USB lies in asyncronous mounting, and I believe him, cos he's the junior vice-champion of the world in computer science. He brought me to Linux. If I only new how to force USB devices to mount syncronously ? (On that way it would be an instant transfer, like Windows does). Anyway I've tried umount -l /dev/sda1 command and it worked with the few examples, but I don't know wether this works in all cases. And I'm a lazy one too...