Best mount options for external USB ext3 disk drive

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

I have an external USB ext3 disk drive. Everything is working fine, I plug it 
in an an icon appears on my (KDE) desktop, which I can use to mount and 
unmount the device.

However, I have noticed that writing to the device the behaviour is rather 
different to my main system disks. It appears not much caching is going on - 
On the main system when creating a large file, the writes a done in big bulks 
every now and then, whereas on this disk it is continuous low level activity.

I'm wondering if this is normal for a USB disk, or are there options I can 
teak somewhere to get better mounting ? 

jonesc at localhost ~ > mount
/dev/hda7 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda5 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda10 on /data type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda6 on /data2 type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda8 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda2 on /winxp type ntfs (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=000)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
AFS on /afs type afs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /media/MassStorage type ext3 
(rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,sync,data=ordered)

The last one is the USB disk, mounted via HAL. Is this optimal ?

cheers Chris