Charles, The trade-off for mounting USB devices sync would be faster wear and tear on the drive, along with applications hanging for longer periods of time while trying to write data.
Even operating systems that mount sync (Linux OR Windows or whatever) do not make it safe to yank out USB devices. That still leaves the possible of corrupted filesystem metadata structures -- I've interned at the IT desk for a large company before and I've personally seen cases (multiple) on windows XP where FAT32 thumb drives were unrecoverably corrupted due to improper removal. Mounting 'sync' does exactly what XP tells you: Optimize for quick removal. In other words, the "unmounting" (safely remove hardware) option executes faster, but you still have to do it. Never ever is it safe to yank thumb drives out of systems -- windows or linux. Just because you got away with it before doesn't make it safe! -- unmounting of removable drives should show a progress dialog https://launchpad.net/bugs/32643 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
