Nautilus file operations problem

[Robert Nichols]

Robert Nichols wrote:
> Paolo Galtieri wrote:
>> I tried to copy a file from my hard disk to a USB flash drive using drag 
>> and drop and the nautilus file manager.  When I did this a file 
>> operations window popped up showing progress of the copy.  It stopped at 
>> 245.5Mb of 278.6Mb, however, when you look at the destination file it is 
>> in fact all there.  Doing an md5sum of the source file and the 
>> destination file shows them to be the same.  I removed the destination 
>> file and tried the copy again, and this time it stopped at 246.5Mb of 
>> 278.6Mb.  If I try to unmount the USB drive it fails with volume is 
>> busy, even though the file has been copied over completely.  If I try to 
>> force the unmount it fails with volume busy.  Eventually (after about 5 
>> minutes) it seems to finally recognize that the copy is complete and 
>> allows me to unmount the drive.  If the file has completed copying why 
>> does the nautilus file operation popup take a long time before it goes away?
>>
>> No matter how many times I do the copy the nautilus file operation popup 
>> takes several minutes to report completion.
>>
>> I'm running F12 with all the latest updates.
> 
> Nautilus is waiting for fsync() to return, indicating that the data has
> actually been written to the device.  Unmounting is similarly waiting for
> the writes to complete.  When you think you are looking at the file on
> the device, all you are really seeing is the data in the kernel's buffer
> cache.  Writes to USB drives max out at around 30MB/s, so you should
> expect it to take 9 minutes or more to transfer that 278MB file.

That calculation, of course, makes no sense.  At 30MB/s a 278MB transfer
would take 9.2 _seconds_, not 9 minutes.  However, USB flash drives do not
achieve anywhere near 30MB/s for writes.  Five or 6 minutes is a quite
likely time for a 278MB transfer to most commonly available flash drives.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.