Management of removable drive's is inconsistent and confusing

[drwt]

I have received some feedback and support requests from the current way Ubuntu MATE handles external drive's and started looking at this.

Currently the way Ubuntu MATE handles removable drive's is confusing to users and inconsistent.

To demonstrate I have 3 USB thumbdrive's and one USB HDD.

When I want to safely remove the attached USB drive this is the behaviour that follows:

Thumbdrive #1: 1 option which is to Eject the drive, when I press eject the drive's integrated LED starts a continuous flashing like there was a constant file operation going. This leads me to believe I cannot remove it safely as it clearly seems to send/receive data.

(Bonus: When I unmount in the Disks utility I do not get the continuous flashing)

Thumbdrive #2: This gives me 2 options: Eject and Safely Remove Drive. There doesnt seem to be any functional difference between the two and I do not understand why it give's me 2 options. This drive has no LED.

Thumbdrive #3: This drive gives me only 1 option which is Eject. When I Eject this drive the LED stays on which does give the appearance it is still connected.

USB HDD: Now this one gives me only 1 option, which is to Safely Remove Drive. However when I do this the LED on the enclosure stays on and the HDD keeps spinning. After waiting for 1 minute the HDD spins down (the LED goes off too). I guess the spindown is unrelated and a power saving function somewhere else.

I would like to propose the following to make the behaviour of drive removal more logical and in line with other operating systems:

I do not know the technical difference between Eject and Safely Remove, but if the behaviour of these options is actually the same, keep "Safely Remove Drive" as its message is clear and drop the Eject option.

The behaviour after pressing Safely Remove Drive should be to unmount the drive and after that spin down and turn its power off.

Bonus: I observed that sometimes when ejecting I get a notification to empty the trash to free the space on the drive which is great. However, this option got presented only a couple of times during the testing, even though I ejected the drive several times with trash on it.

[Arthur Tan (artgtan)]

This is an old issue. For example, see http://askubuntu.com/questions/86019/what-is-the-difference-between-eject-and-safely-remove-device

Ideally, "Eject" should be reserved for CDROM, DVD's etc; "Safely Remove" should be used for flash drives of all sizes.

[drwt (6lobe)]

Does that mean this is an issue even with the base Ubuntu (Unity)? Cannot test that right now.

IIRC Lubuntu and Xubuntu exhibit the correct behaviour i.e. unmount/spindown/powerdown. This is also how Windows handles removing removable drives.

There seems to be quite a few things going on here considering the issue with the inconsistent trash emptying and the weird behaviour with the flashing led on of the drives, that doesnt happen when unmounting in gnome disk utility...

[Arthur Tan (artgtan)]

Yes, it's an issue with stock Ubuntu, not just Ubuntu MATE.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

This has been fixed in caja 1.18.0 which was recently released in the Ubuntu Mate 17.04 daily images.