Comment 9 for bug 404185

This definitely seems to only be happing with Nautilus & gvfs. I believe this patch is the culprit if it made it in :

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/gvfs/commit/?h=gdu-volume-monitor&id=303cfd43578f0a4198c063f1a5fbcd16fec2b0bf

When using other programs such as Palimpsest (it's the new disk utility) .. it will eject the volume from the Realtek reader without issue and it still stays connected to the USB bus.

Also this bug is interesting:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574067