Presently, in Nautilus, USB drives have a button next to them on the left pane to unmount. Hitting this button unmounts the drive, but does not also shut it down. To shut down the drive without the command line, a user needs to open Disks from where they can shut down the drive. This unmounts all partitions on the drive and shuts it down - light on thumb drive stops blinking, HDD spins down.
When a user has Nautilus open and they wish to remove the USB drive, would it not serve them better for the button to unmount and power down the drive? I believe waiting for the light to go off is still common advice for when it is safe to remove a drive. What is the present utility of unmounting but not powering down?
I posit that, while a user could go to Disks for this need, Nautilus is an equally natural location for this feature - if not more so owing to similar functioning in other operating systems.
The issue as I understand it is that there isn’t really a clear way on how to best tackle the issue.
We’d need an agreed upon approach on what to do in which situation, including a way to handle multi-disk drives and a way to distinguish them from single drive disks.
There should be a “Safely remove” (or similar) option in the context menu of the drive, if it supports that.
Right, and conversely Disks is needed for this operation if the device to be removed does not support “Safely remove”. I’m happy it works, I’m just thinking of users surprised by the lack of “Safely remove” with some drives.
Is there a way to know before purchasing whether a USB drive supports “Safely remove”?
Thank you for pointing me to those threads. Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood, but it appears the issue is one of design. It’s heartening to know this is given thought. If I may add my imagination, I picture a prompt asking users if they are aware that powering down the drive associated with this volume will affect a list of other volumes as well. The user would then have the option to either cancel the operation, unmount this volume only, or proceed with unmounting all associated volumes and powering down the disk.
I won’t pretend to have solved in five minutes something that undoubtedly requires several greater minds put together. I’m merely adding my feeble voice to the desire to see it done.
It seems that the “Safely remove drive” context menu entry is not shown before unmounting the volume, but it appears after unmounting. If you don’t see it and the Disks app allows that, then it might be a bug in the Files app because both applications use UDisks2 API to deal with that…