Comment 698 for bug 500069

Okay, sync might work, but it also would make filesystems slow as hell and contribute to media wear from another side. If what you say is the case, and I have no reason for disbelief, then there must be a way to limit the number of dirty blocks (and total blocks) which may exist before buffers are flushed. E. g., there's X seconds of commit interval or Y dirty blocks, whichever comes first, and a max Z buffered blocks in total per device or per system. This would be 'almost sync', I think, and it would solve one more problem with USB flash media.

The problem is that too big write buffers tend to be flushed at a sub-optimal speed, thus increasing the total time needed to copy and sync the data. Again, this does not occur neither with Windows nor with OS X. And they don't mount 'sync'; they buffer writes (which is a good thing with any device with expensive and wearsome writes), it's just that their buffers are considerably smaller in size than those of Linux.

I'd be happy to know that a solution of limiting buffer sizes exists, this at least would enable us to fine-tune the system so that in 90% of use cases the problem wouldn't appear, and that it would appear only in the cases where it's tough anyway.