I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
Strongly disagreed. A lot of removable storage benefits very strongly from async writes. The performance benefits are night-and-day and worth the hassle of explicitly unmounting.
I think a better compromise would be to mount non-journaled + removable storage (e.g. vfat USB keys) as sync.