Comment 6 for bug 624510

I have observed this behavior on 64-bit xubuntu, either using thunar, nautilus or just cp to drive. Most of the times USB drives, eithe ext3 or fat perform well, but I have observed extreme sluggishness making the drve totally unusable. Rebooting corrects the problem. This was observed on 2 identical PCs.
It happened to me when I was in the need of finishing a transfer operation in high speed...Next time I will try:

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 54 MB in 3.00 seconds = 17.99 MB/sec

and:

sudo seeker /dev/sdb1
Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html
Benchmarking /dev/sdb1 [953867MB], wait 30 seconds..............................
Results: 60 seeks/second, 16.66 ms random access time

to compare with the values I am getting now.

I will try to unmount and mount by hand e.g

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 ~/ext/tmp

assuming sdb1 is the drive shown on:

ls /dev

and

~/ext/tmp

exists (note the ~ is the same as /home/<user>)

I am still to understand the automount system in Lucid, as neither autofs nor autofs5 are installed in my systems. Hal is probably to blame for what we are observing. Will conduct a few trials.

Cheers

Antonio