Flushing data to external storage devices

I agree. Most people would not think to right-click the drive on the Desktop and select "Eject". People expect to be able to take their USB drive out when they like and have all their files be on the drive, as they are able to do in Windows. I belive (please correct me if I'm wrong) XP uses no drive caching by default to solve this problem. Windows 2000 displays a warning when you don't properly eject a removable device and shows you how to properly remove the device in the future.

If the drive caching problem can't be solved, making it more obvious how to unmount the Flash drive and/or displaying a warning similar to Windows 2000's when the drive is improperly removed would be good. (I'm not a developer, so I have no idea how hard any of this would be to implement)

Just read http://readlist.com/lists/vger.kernel.org/linux-kernel/22/111748.html

Since immediately writing to the drive appears to be a bad idea, is it possible to have some kind of helper screen to guide new users? A new user of (K)ubuntu is going to switch back to their good old Windows install as fast as possible if they lose data from their Flash drive - they won't know why or how to fix it.

After reading about the problems with writing to flash drives, I still believe that we can find a compromise that will assist users and make it obvious that the data has not yet been committed.

With regards to writing data, these 2 steps will greatly reduce the chance of loss of data without the need for excessive writes.
1. Write after a period of inactivity with of the drive.
2. Write after a full operation has occurred, such as adding a directory full of files, but not for each file unless that was the only operation.
3. Write before any read access (which I suspect happens already).

Combine this with obvious indicators to the user that the operations have not yet been committed, such as
1. Adding a task bar item with options to:
     a. View the list of operations pending
     b. Commit the pending operations.
     c. Unmount or disconnect.
2. Add a glyph to the files and folders in nautalis to indicate that they have not been comitted. Something similar to tortoise svn for windows would be amazing and probably easy to implement.

Obviously, a similar approach should also be adopted in Kubuntu.

which package does the writing?

Feisty and up come with a notification for flushing to prevent user from removing the device too fast. In case it does not function properly in some situation, please feel free to file a bug against it.