1st I'll explain something, windoze copies to any internal or external hard drive, on-the-fly, Linux doesn't, it uses a temporary storage buffer.

When coping to a USB hard drive, yes it shows the file copying bar, but after the bar has finished Linux is still emptying the buffer, and there is no visual indication that the copying process has completely finished.

Is there a way that Ubuntu can use on-the-fly copying to USB and the copy bar reflects the true copying process?, so that when the bar has reached the end at 100%, it actually means copying has completed and the USB drive can be removed.

You can add "sync" to the mount options when you mount the drive.
Either in fstab, or the mount command.

Probably slow it down a (fair) bit.
I just issue umount - when that returns, you're done. And no, it doesn't have a nice GUI that I'm aware of.

The problem in using umount is that I have to add myself to the sudoers file, or add myself to the root group so that I can use 'sudo umount <dev>'

The other option might work using sync, but Ubuntu uses UUID's for drive designations in the fstab file, and it changes every time the drive is re-inserted, thus adding sync as an option in fstab will not work, because of the UUID change.

There has to be a way to add the sync option to the automount command, so that when any USB storage device is attached, the automount would apply the sync option during it's mounting of the drive.

That'd be udev rules.

If you add the option user to the mount options in fstab that won't be needed.

Then don't use UUIDs. It is not mandatory. On the contrary, UUIDs were introduced to be sure that a certain drive would be recognized as that drive and mounted accordingly. Instead of using sba, sdb, etc which order could change during booting. You want to mount ignoring the UUID, so enter /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc in your fstab to mount USB sticks.

jlinkels