"Safely Remove Drive" command gone in F17?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 15:08 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
> On 05/18/2012 03:01 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> > I just saw on a Windows 7 machine that the menu item is labeled
> > "Eject" for a USB drive, so Gnome is not actually doing anything
> > different.
> One difference is that on Windows 7, in addition to the "Eject" menu
> command, there is also a "Safely remove drive" icon in the system tray
> which makes it crystal clear that the drive is being completely removed
> from the system.
> 
> Another difference is that on Windows 7, when you eject a drive, you get
> a notification explicitly telling you it's safe to remove it, whereas
> GNOME has chosen to display a notification only when it is /not/ safe to
> remove it, thus leaving users guessing about whether it's safe to remove
> the drive.

The KDE Device Notifier does tell you when it's safe to remove.

> Another difference is that on Windows 7, when you eject a drive, it
> still shows up in "Computer", whereas when you "Safely remove" it, its
> icon disappears from the "Computer" folder. GNOME has no equivalent that
> will cause a removeable device to completely go away.

Under KDE the device disappears until reinserted.

> (One way Fedora and Windows 7 are the same is that I just tried my thumb
> drive with the LED and the light didn't go off when I did "Safely
> remove" on it, so either I'm remembering wrong that the LED used to turn
> off, or Windows 7 has changed that behavior.)

The operating system just knows when it has finished sending the data to
the drive. OTOH in the case of thumb drives the light tells you that the
drive is still using power, presumably because its internal controller
hasn't finished writing data to the Flash memory (remember that this is
more complicated than writing to normal RAM). You should always check
the light, or wait a few seconds if the thumb drive has no light.

poc