Opinions on disabling drive write cache?

[spamhog]

I just discovered I lived very well for years with only synchronous storage writes.

Now, Mint 20.1 the GUI file copy dialogs "falsely" report write done,
but drive can stay busy for a long time afterwards.

This even fools FreeFileSync, which happily rings its bell announcing the end of a still unfinished directory synchronization write. E.g. 1GB to a USB 2.0 in a few seconds.

This happens on both a new SSD with its own onboard hardware cache (brief and painless wait), and old USB thumb drives that don't have one and on an older OS didn't show this unrealistic early completion.

So there has to be a software buffer.

I see no use in pretending a write is over when it's not.
- you can't umount
- you can't shutdown
- you risk damaging a drive by unplugging too early

Questions:
- what are the advantages of nonsynchronous writes?
- does anyone here disable it?
- and how?

Touched upon here:
viewtopic.php?&t=251723

This reminds me of some old incidents in which clients thought they had sent me files, but had only managed to email me some nice Windows links to files still sitting out of reach on their own computers.

[manyroads]

FWIW... here's a thread:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchan ... synchronou

[AZgl1800]

Personally,
I would turn it off for good.

it is a super PITA.

[absque fenestris]

...
This even fools FreeFileSync, which happily rings its bell announcing the end of a still unfinished directory synchronization write. E.g. 1GB to a USB 2.0 in a few seconds.
...

You've really put your finger deep into the wound there.

We users might think that there is a conspiracy of the USB stick manufacturers behind this strange caching, to hide how bad the things actually are.
Specifications are patient: 48MB/sec was promised us with USB-2 - High Speed...
Well yes, with USB-3 we get a bit closer to the USB-2 specification ...

[spamhog]

I decided to leave async write on for the moment. One has to be careful with the optimistic write-completed reports. But it's not that different from e.g. Thunar moving files to trash or deleting them without asking for confirmation. Or carrying a gun with a round in the chamber. Or nuclear power. Or pitbulls. There are pros and cons. /