Comment 18 for bug 61946

I highly disagree with the original claims in that article. As someone who does a lot of work with embedded devices and CompactFlash, as well as an avid user of flash media, even the cheapest devices I can locally purchase can put up with an astounding number of read-write cycles, much more than the typical use-span of a thumbdrive can put on them.

Comparing a slightly premature failure in 15 years rather than 20 versus users ripping out the thumbdrive when KDE <b>assured</b> the user that his data was written, which sounds worse?

Perhaps remounting read-only, then unmounting is a better solution though I have no idea if dbus/hal has a backend for doing that.

In reality Linux needs behavior similar to Windows XP's handling of removable media, that is, turning off writeback caching. Right now "sync" is as close as we can get to that, but obviously it has some not-so-intuitive side effects.