I made a script for Xfce Generic Monitor applet that tells me how much data is written to usb disks. Runs periodically every few seconds. With Mate Desktop, I think Command applet can be set to run this script. At least it tells you when the drive is in idle state or writing. Along with some indication about how much data was written since the drive was plugged in.
[code]#!/bin/bash
if ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/usb &>/dev/null; then
USB_DET=($(ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/*usb* | grep -v "part" | awk '{print $NF}' | awk -F "/" '{print $NF}' | sort))
for usb in "${USB_DET[@]}"
do
if [ $(awk "{ print \$9 }" /sys/block/$usb/stat) -gt 0 ]
then
sector_size=$(cat /sys/block/$usb/queue/hw_sector_size)
DATA_WRITTEN=$(awk '{load = $7*sector/1000/1000
printf "%.1f", load}' sector="$sector_size" /sys/block/$usb/stat)
printf "%s: %s%s " "$usb" "$DATA_WRITTEN" "MiB"
else
printf "%s: %s " "$usb" "idle"
fi
done
else
echo “None”
fi[/code]