Hi, I have an external USB ext3 disk drive. Everything is working fine, I plug it in an an icon appears on my (KDE) desktop, which I can use to mount and unmount the device. However, I have noticed that writing to the device the behaviour is rather different to my main system disks. It appears not much caching is going on - On the main system when creating a large file, the writes a done in big bulks every now and then, whereas on this disk it is continuous low level activity. I'm wondering if this is normal for a USB disk, or are there options I can teak somewhere to get better mounting ? jonesc@localhost ~ > mount /dev/hda7 on / type ext3 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) /dev/hda5 on /boot type ext3 (rw) /dev/hda10 on /data type ext3 (rw) /dev/hda6 on /data2 type ext3 (rw) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) /dev/hda8 on /home type ext3 (rw) /dev/hda2 on /winxp type ntfs (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=000) none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw) sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw) AFS on /afs type afs (rw) /dev/sda1 on /media/MassStorage type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered) The last one is the USB disk, mounted via HAL. Is this optimal ? cheers Chris