Fedora

If a partition stops being writable, it's probably having disk errors of some sort. You may see relevant error messages with dmesg | less

The sdb/sdb1 difference isn't from different kinds of drives, it's because of their contents. Some flash-drives come formatted like old-fashioned floppies -- no partition table. These just show up as /dev/sdb. Others come formatted with a partition table, like hard drives usually do, and show up as /dev/sdb + /dev/sdb1. /dev/sdb is the raw disk, /dev/sdb1 is the first partition.

It's possible to have more than one partition on a flash drive, just like any other block device can, but Windows doesn't support this very well.

Thank you, guru Corona688.

BTW, My fedora 15 on GNOME3 have a right-click menu "remove device safely", after I click it, the LED of the usb drive is off. How to let the LED off after I umount the usb drive in console?

Again, the behavior of the light is hardware and OS dependent. Not even all versions of Windows turn the light off for all models of USB drives. Once umount has successfully finished it's safe to remove the drive, period.

On some drives, using eject instead of umount will turn the light off. Again, this isn't universal.

But I am using the same OS and the same hardware. What is diffrent is the console and GNOME. I am wondering what GNOME done to let the LED off? Not eject, it dosen't turn off the LED on my OS.

Other people have reported the opposite experience as you: eject turning the LED off and gnome not turning the LED off.

It's hardware and OS dependent.

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You are running eject as root, yes?

yes.

Then what?