Best mount options for USB flash drives?

[Peter]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, Walter Dnes wrote:

>  Flash drives have a finite (large, but still finite) number of writes
> before a sector "wears out".  I just got an MP3 player and am charging
> the internal battery... via USB... nice.
>
>  The player is formatted fat32 according to "fdisk -l".  I assume that
> "noatime" is a necessity.  Even with a FAT32 fs, the "ls" command will
> cause the "access time" attribute for a file to be rewritten.  "noatime"
> overrides that.  I'm not sure whether or not "sync" is even possible on
> a FAT32 mount, but my gut feeling is that "async" should be "kinder and
> gentler" on the flash drive, because it gathers together a bunch of
> separate writes into one big write.  Does USB2 versus USB1.1 make any
> difference?

My current options for automounting cameras and flash drives are:

fs="vfat"; options="rw,async,noatime,users,exec,uid=plp,gid=users,umask=000";;

additionally, automount is run with --timeout=2 which causes fast 
unmounts. Fast enough that you have to be real quick to pull the drive 
out before it stops flashing.

Peter
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