Issue with USB drives

While copying large amounts of small files from any disk to a USB thumb drive, I run into the issue of any type of status suggesting that all files have been written to the thumb drive, but there is still an activity light on the drive.

This creates a REAL problem. The expectation that most people would have with a portable disk is that when reading or writing is reported as complete, the actual files have indeed been copied/moved/etc....

What will happen though with say, 100GB+ of small files is the progress bar shows the job is complete, but the drive indicator continues flashing. It's one thing for this flashing to go on for a few seconds, but when it continues for many minutes, it's easy to get a sense that something went wrong with the operation or the operating system is doing something with the disk, or there's a problem with the disk.

This is the problem I have. I'm looking at a disk that seems to never stop flashing (really, because it's more than 5 minutes after the progress bar showed the job complete) but the system reported that operation as complete a few minutes ago.

So, when working with portable disks, Linux needs to behave the same way Windows would, in that you don't have many GBs of data buffered and continuing to write after the system reports the job complete. Or, I should say better than Windows because Windows will still have SOME amount of data it's still writing to the USB disk when it reports being finished.