I have a lot of USB peripherals hung on my cpmputer. At the moment there are 17 of them (there are three plugged directly into the computer rather than through the hubs). As a result, I get to deal with the "Safely Remove Hardware" business a lot.

If I have good reason to believe that the computer is not actually writing to the device, how critical is it to "Safely Remove..." rather than just unplug it? Am I risking damage to a flash drive or to my Kindle if I callously pull the cable out of it without going through the dance?

tanstaafl.

I just pull them out and haven't had a problem.

Admit it. You put all those lables on, just for this picture.

FWIW I don't think my kindle has ever been attached to my pc via its own cable.

I didn't even notice that I was too busy thinking about how he could have 17 things that need to be plugged in all the time

You're probably not going to harm anything, but the reason that Windows wants you to tell it that you're going to remove storage media is because it doesn't (necessarily) write everything to to storage media right when you tell it to. It often caches it up to be written in bigger, more efficient chunks. If you just yank it out, it might not have the data on it that you just wrote to it. Even worse, it might end up in a weird state where files, possibly even files you didn't touch, might get corrupted.

So, yeah, you should go through that dance.

I've had one or two instances where either files weren't written to the drive, or some other weirdness happened. I've only yanked the drive out when it wasn't essential data, but it's still annoying when it happens.

It's slightly annoying, but it's only two clicks to make sure you're okay.

Most of the time I take the risk that it might break something and if it does (not sure it ever has) I know it was probably my fault. If I'm not batting 1.000 it would have to be something like 0.999.

If it's something really important like a presentation or something that I had to give I'd probably make sure I did the safely remove but it's pretty rare that I ever do it.

I think as long as it's a few seconds to give it time to flush the cache after you've finished writing you should be OK.

I think there is some kind of configuration for flushing immediately. I presume Windows may do this by default given that most people just yank them out.

The data storage peripherals I would do the "Safely Remove" steps, the other ones aren't necessary. Of course, the data storage ones are probably the only ones that get removed.

They're the only ones you can do safely remove on.

See, it all works out!

The "safely remove" step is not needed for flash drives, and likely not for the Kindle either. Windows treats such devices differently than it does hard drives and will not cache writes to them, purposefully so that you can unplug them without any manual software intervention.

But with regards to corrupting regular hard drives by simply unplugging them? It's not only likely, it's going to eventually happen, guaranteed. The effect can probably be repaired the next time the drive is used, but you never know. I've pooched a filesystem this way before.

Specifically, I think, based on the "is_removable" bit in the descriptors. So it's up to the USB device vendor whether to trigger that behaviour. Skipping "safely remove" is the same as saying that you trust your USB device vendor to have got it right...

Peter

Doesn't Windows tell you based on the device?

Mac OS X doesn't have this functionality at all - which I can't believe as it's a PITA.

Yeah it does. You drag the volume to the Trash Can. Same as it's been since ancient versions of MacOS.

I think he was saying that OS X doesn't have a safe remove without having to manually tell the system first. Hence why it screams bloody murder every time you unplug a thumb drive.

I remember being horrified, the first time "eject by trashing" was shown to me.
My gut reaction was "That action should cause the drive to be erased!"

Dragging to trash has largely been replaced with an Eject icon next to the entry for the drive in the source list of Finder windows too. Trash was counter-intuitive for most people, even if they did change the icon to an eject when you pick up a removable volume. And especially since doing that to a fixed volume meant you wanted to erase it.