this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I don't fucking know why I can't eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don't know who's lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.

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[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Writes are asynchronous on Linux.

Unless I mount it with sync, which I wish would be default for non-system drives (which are going to be in fstab anyway). I didn't notice any difference, aside from the lack of guessing when the magic is over. 2GiB goes into black hole, now what?

[–] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

You can also use the sync command to flush cached writes and wait for completion, but I agree that it is a bit cumbersome.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Strongly disagreed. A lot of removable storage benefits very strongly from async writes. The performance benefits are night-and-day and worth the hassle of explicitly unmounting.

I think a better compromise would be to mount non-journaled + removable storage (e.g. vfat USB keys) as sync.